2
Appeal No. 2005-0748
Application No. 09/190,727
THE INVENTION
The appellants’ invention relates to an anonymous shopping service. See, for
example, pages 8-9 and 20-21 of the specification and Figure 11 of the drawings. An
information bank (23) having an anonymizer module (153) acts as an intermediary
between a consumer (25) and a merchant (133). The information bank replaces the
identity of the customer with a different alias for each merchant website. The
anonymous shopping service allows a consumer to span multiple shopping sites and
shopping sessions and create a consolidated order. The information bank then
consolidates orders from multiple consumers and pays the merchants directly in lump
sum together with a summary of orders and corresponding ship-to addresses. The
information bank bills the consumer so that credit card and other identification are not
exchanged over the Internet. The consumer also has the option of having their
purchases shipped initially to a drop box or reshipper address where a third party will
then ship the purchases to the consumer at their address.
Representative claim 22 reads as follows:
A method of transmitting purchase data in a database concerning a first
consumer’s order to at least one merchant independently of action by the first
consumer, the method comprising:
storing a first data store made up of data comprising a first consumer’s purchase data;
storing a second data store made up of data comprising a second consumer’s purchase
data;
extracting the first consumer’s purchase data from the database;
extracting the second consumer’s purchase data from the database;
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