Patent ID: 7949572

Claim:
An electronic commerce system comprising: a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing executable software modules comprising: a shopping cart management module for, responsive to a customer selecting a single shopping cart link to purchase a pre-arranged virtual shopping cart created by an agent and containing a plurality of items selected by the agent from a plurality of different online merchants, receiving information from the agent regarding the pre-arranged virtual shopping cart and the items contained within the pre-arranged virtual shopping cart; a transaction module for: dynamically updating one or more prices of items in the virtual shopping cart to reflect current prices offered by the merchants for the items; determining a total price, based on the dynamically updated prices, for purchasing the items in the virtual shopping cart; an accounting module for charging the customer the total price determined and for crediting the merchants and the agent for each item purchased from each merchant; and a processor configured to execute the software modules stored by the computer readable storage medium.