Patent ID: 8566166

Claim:
A method of pre-assigning advertising rates to a plurality of products offered by a merchant, the method comprising: providing, by a bidding platform computing device, computer-executable code useable to generate a computer interface usable by a merchant in order to define bid rules for determining advertising rates for the plurality of products offered by the merchant, wherein each bid rule comprises: a bid amount indicating an absolute advertising rate or a relative bid adjustment to be made to a base advertising rate; a rule definition comprising criteria for identifying products of the merchant associated with the respective bid rule, the criteria comprising one or more price criteria, taxonomy criteria, or product manufacturer criteria; and a bidding priority indicating a respective priority of the bid rule in relation to other bid rules; transmitting the computer-executable code to a computing device of the merchant; receiving one or more bid rules defined by the merchant from the merchant computing device; applying the received one or more bid rules defined by the merchant to the plurality of products offered by the merchant, wherein the bidding priorities of respective bid rules are useable to determine which of one or more bid rules that each apply to a particular product to use in determining an advertising rate for the particular product; and determining and assigning, based on the applied one or more bid rules, advertising rates for the plurality of products.