SYSTEM AND METHOD PROVIDING CROSS-BRANDED VIRTUALIZED INVENTORY CAPABILITY

摘要

Systems and methods in accordance with the disclosures made herein uniquely aggregates inventory into a virtual inventory for multiple dealers. The virtual inventory provides the ability to access a variety of private inventory pools simultaneously and have the ability to search these inventories including one's physical stock, thereby creating an added dimension of inventory for buyers and sellers and allowing more opportunities for faster transactions at normalized pricing. With greater supply and demand, there is greater probability of prices finding the optimum trading level. In this manner, the virtual inventory is a supplement to physical inventory. The virtual inventory allows dealers to be more judicious about the level of inventory investment they need to achieve a target service levels. Inventory aggregation can be in the form of private pools of cross-brand, virtualized inventory of a subset of a plurality of dealers.

主权项

1. A system, comprising:
a plurality of dealer inventory management apparatuses each associated with a respective one of a plurality of inventory item dealers, wherein each one of the inventory item dealers is a dealer for a respective brand of inventory item; and a virtual inventory management server accessible by each one of the dealer inventory management apparatuses, wherein the virtual inventory management server enables a cross-brand virtual inventory of each one of the inventory item dealers to be created and searched and wherein the cross-brand virtual inventory of a particular one of the inventory item dealers includes inventory of at least one other one of the inventory item dealers.