Patent ID: 6901380

Claim:
A merchandising system for processing a customer order in association with a web hosting computer, a client computer, and a business application computer, the web hosting computer and the business application computer being intermittently connected by a communications link, the merchandising system comprising: a merchandising database containing merchandising data including order data pertaining to customer orders for merchandise, the merchandising system managing merchandising data received from a plurality of vendors; a web host interface establishing a communications link between the business application computer and the web hosting computer; a replica generator executing on the business application computer to filter out at least the order data from the merchandising database to create a replica of the merchandise database containing the merchandising data without the order data for transmission to the web hosting computer across the intermittently connected communications link; a web application executing on the web hosting computer and generating an order guide that displays the merchandising data from the replica on the client computer; and a synchronization module synchronizing the replica with the merchandising database to cause only modifications made to the merchandising database to be updated in the replica.