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Appeal No. 2005-0748
Application No. 09/190,727
OPINION
Having carefully reviewed the obviousness issues raised in this appeal in light of
the record before us, we make the determinations that follow.
Before addressing the merits of the rejection, we would like to again highlight the
subject matter of appellant’s invention. Appellants’ invention relates to an anonymous
shopping feature that functions like a “shopping cart” on a website, which enables a
consumer to create a consolidated purchase order after spanning multiple merchant
websites and shopping sessions. The anonymous shopping feature utilizes an
information bank to serve as an intermediary between the customer and the merchant.
The information bank provides an alias for each consumer, and a different alias can be
used for different merchants. The information bank consolidates orders made by
different consumers and pays the merchants directly in lump sum along with a summary
of orders and corresponding ship to addresses. The consumer is billed by the
information bank so that credit card information and other information are not transmitted
over the Internet. In contrast, the Goldhaber reference which has been used by the
examiner as the principle reference in the obviousness rejections on appeal addresses
various methods for merchants to target advertising to interested consumers utilizing
demographic data. We note that although appellants devote a significant part of their
specification to subject matter similar to that disclosed by Goldhaber, i.e., to a third party
service to market demographic and other marketing related information to
manufacturers, distributors, etc., appellants’ claims 22-24 are directed to the anonymous
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