| 摘要 |
A method and apparatus creating and managing an electronic shopping cart enabling a user to shop at various merchants' web sites are described. The apparatus and method enable the creation of a central shopping cart without the need for a pre-arrangement with the merchants. Rather, the shopping cart accesses the various merchants' sites, searches for specific purchase-related fields, creates a database of those fields, and creates a hyperlink to that merchant's site. When a user wishes to access the merchant's site, the shopping cart acts as a proxy for the user, but also monitors the communication for specific requests. If a specific request, such as add to cart, has been identified, the shopping cart doesn't relay this request to the merchant's shopping cart, but rather fetches relevant shopping data from the fields database and composes a purchase order which is sent to the merchant's site.
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