| 摘要 |
The invention provides methods and apparatus for implementing electronic commerce applications over the Internet or in other types of computer systems, in a manner which improves conditions for buying and selling for consumers and vendors. An illustrative embodiment is implemented in the form of an e-commerce web site which includes consumer-specific pages each corresponding to a particular consumer, vendor-specific pages each corresponding to a particular vendor, and a processing system which controls communication between the consumer-specific and vendor-specific pages. The processing system includes or otherwise has access to a set of servers and a corresponding set of databases for processing consumer requests. A given consumer request generated at a particular one of the consumer-specific pages is processed by the processing system such that information from one or more vendors associated with the vendor-specific pages can be supplied to the consumer via the consumer-specific page. For example, a vendor without a commerce-enabled web site can register with the system such that information from the vendor is delivered to the consumer as part of, e.g., a product comparison search. In other embodiments, the consumer-specific and vendor-specific pages may each be implemented as separate web sites which interact with the processing system to provide the desired functionality. |
