Patent ID: 8046268

Claim:
A computer-processor based method of payment for mufti-vendor gift cards, comprising: (a) maintaining, by an e-commerce server, a merchandise database comprising records for merchandise and services for a plurality of merchants, each record including (i) a stock keeping unit (SKU) for an item of merchandise or service, (ii) a description of the item, (iii) a price of the item, and (iv) the merchant for the item; (b) enabling, by the e-commerce server, a gift card giver to interactively purchase a gift card for a gift card recipient, entitling the gift card recipient to redeem the gift card for items up to a specified spending limit; (c) electronically transferring, by the e-commerce server, the money used to purchase the gift card into a card funding account that is used to pay for purchases by the gift card recipient; (d) enabling, by the e-commerce server, the gift card recipient to interactively select one or more items from the merchandise database, thereby generating an aggregated selection of items for each merchant; (e) issuing orders, by the e-commerce server, to each merchant in accordance with the aggregated selected items corresponding to each merchant; and (f) paying, by the e-commerce server, each merchant the amount of their respective order from the card funding account.