Patent ID: 7051000

Claim:
An electronic purchase system for providing a site where a plurality of sellers and a plurality of purchasers participate, comprising: a storage unit storing sales-related information about commodities that the sellers offer, the sales-related information defining for each commodity that at least one seller offers, at least one target purchaser of each of the at least one seller and respective sales conditions; a purchaser registration unit registering a permission flag indicating, for each of the purchasers, whether each seller permits a trade therewith; a publication unit making the sales-related information for each commodity public to any of the purchasers only if the permission flag corresponding to each information receiving purchaser indicates that the at least one seller of the commodity permits the trade therewith; and a management unit recording a trade amount for each of the purchasers and updating the permission flag to reject trades with each restricted purchaser when the trade amount corresponding thereto for a past period is less than a predetermined threshold, wherein when a prospective purchaser selects an offered commodity from an electronic catalog, said publication unit accesses said storage unit to generate first information corresponding to the offered commodity, extracts second information corresponding to the prospective purchaser from the first information, generates from the second information third information corresponding to each seller for which the permission flag indicates permission to trade with the prospective purchaser, and provides the third information to the prospective purchaser.