Patent Application
20080183588
IBM® is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., U.S.A. Other names used herein may be registered trademarks, trademarks or product names of International Business Machines Corporation or other companies.
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to point of sale payment systems, and more particularly to systems and methods for providing information about consumer preferences and optionally enforcing those preferences.
2. Description of the Related Art
Consumers have many types of preferences for products and services that are purchased by them or their minor children. In some cases, there are preferences related to safety concerns, such as avoiding ingredients like nuts, wheat, and phenylalanine in response to food allergies. In other cases, there are classes of products that parents would like their children to avoid, such as foods with trans-fats as a way to promote healthy eating, or video games, movies, and CDs with certain ratings as a way to enforce values. Other examples are cultural or religious preferences that restrict the products that consumers buy. Such consumers make extra effort to buy food products that are acceptable to their belief and background by for example avoiding pork or only consuming kosher foods. Consumers may be sensitive to animal cruelty and may only want to buy certain types of products, e.g. cage-free eggs, cosmetics without animal testing. As a final example, consumers may have preferences that help them stay within a budget.
To manage these preferences without assistance requires substantial effort and discipline. For example, in the case of food allergies, consumers must spend considerable time reading the ingredients of each product to make sure that they have not inadvertently purchased and consumed unwanted or even dangerous items. The only way that parents can be absolutely sure that items are not purchased by their children, is to not let them go into stores (or online) unattended or to make certain they have no means of buying anything without the parents present.
What is needed, is a way for consumers to describe certain preferences, for example to at least be warned if a product contains an ingredient like nuts, and then at retail be notified if any items being purchased violate the preferences. As an extension, such a system could block the sale of items that do not conform to the preferences, e.g., purchase of fast-food items at dinnertime. While such a system has obvious benefits and advantages to consumers and could be offered to enhance consumer satisfaction, it also has a commercial advantage of helping consumers and their children behave responsibly, for example in diet choices.
Presently, databases kept by pharmacies warn consumers about medication allergies and adverse medication interactions. However, these pharmacy systems are focused only on medicines and their interactions, are limited to a particular pharmacy network, and suffer from not being aware of medicines purchased from other pharmacy networks. In addition, such systems have little personalization beyond specific drug allergies—a single list of the interactions to avoid is maintained by the pharmacies and the pharmacy advice is dispensed only according to this list, without additional input by the consumer.
To overcome these serious drawbacks, an ideal system needs to not only warn and optionally block a purchase when preferences are violated, but it also needs to be universal, personalized, secure, privacy-preserving, and providing correlation across multiple items and purchase instances over a span of time. In particular, the system needs to be universal, so that any store is able to check the preferences and match them against the items being purchased. It needs to be personalized, in that the consumer should be able in control of the preferences to fit personal and unique needs. An ideal system also needs to be secure in that it will protect preferences from being changed or overridden. For a variety of reasons, many consumers will want such a system to maintain their privacy because it could reveal sensitive information like medical conditions, values, and targeted marketing demographics. Finally, it needs to provide correlation over multiple purchases over a span of time, so that it is possible to set preferences related to frequency of purchases.
A method for linking consumer preferences and purchase decisions with point-of-sale systems, wherein the method includes: defining consumer preferences in a third-party system; obtaining consumer preference identification at a point-of-sale; providing information about purchase items and the consumer preference identification to the third-party validation system; validating that the items being purchased do not violate the consumer preferences; and wherein based on the validating providing notification to the point-of-sale system.
A method for linking consumer preferences and purchase decisions with a point-of-sale systems including: defining consumer preferences in a consumer-controlled device; gathering the preferences from the consumer-controlled device; providing information about purchase items and the consumer preferences to a validating device; wherein the validating device validates that the purchase items do not violate the consumer preferences; and providing notification to the point-of-sale system regarding the result of validating the purchase item.
A system for linking consumer preferences and purchase decisions with point-of-sale systems; wherein the system includes computing devices and a network; wherein the computing devices further include at least one of the following: computer servers; mainframe computers; desktop computers; and mobile computing devices; and wherein at least one of the computing devices is configured to execute electronic software that manages the consumer preferences and purchase decisions with point-of-sale systems; and wherein the electronic software is resident on a storage medium in signal communication with at least one of the computing devices; and wherein at least one of the computing devices is in signal communication with the network; and wherein the network further includes at least one of the following: local area network (LAN); wide area network (WAN); a global network; the Internet; an intranet; wireless networks; and cellular networks; and wherein the electronic software validates that items being purchased do not violate the consumer preferences; and the consumer is notified based on the electronic software validation if consumer preferences are not being met at the point-of-sale system.
Additional features and advantages are realized through the techniques of the present invention. Other embodiments and aspects of the invention are described in detail herein and are considered a part of the claimed invention. For a better understanding of the invention with advantages and features, refer to the description and to the drawings.
As a result of the summarized invention, a solution is technically achieved for a system and method for providing information about consumer preferences and optionally enforcing those preferences at the point of sale, while preserving the consumer's privacy of information.
The subject matter which is regarded as the invention is particularly pointed out and distinctly claimed in the claims at the conclusion of the specification. The foregoing and other objects, features, and advantages of the invention are apparent from the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which:
The detailed description explains the preferred embodiments of the invention, together with advantages and features, by way of example with reference to the drawings.
Embodiments of the present invention provide a system and method for con-elating consumer preferences, product information, and purchase history to help support consumer purchase decisions at the point of sale. It also provides a mechanism for a guardiai's preferences for purchases made by a dependent to be honored. Finally, it provides a system and method for providing the service universally, without storing preferences within any given retailer's information technology infrastructure.
At the time of purchase, the product or service identification is determined 107 by, for example, reading a barcode, radio frequency identification, or visual recognition. Attributes of the product or service, such as ingredients, manufacturer, point of origin, or nutritional information are retrieved 108. The retrieval of attributes can be done as part of the identification 107, or by looking up the product information based on the product or service identification in a local or centralized database. Context information such as the location of purchase, name of the business, time of day, and provider of the service are collected 114. Optionally, the consumer information is read 106 by examining a smart card, RFID, biometrics, or credit card information. This consumer information 106 can be used to lookup consumer preferences stored in persistent storage. Alternatively, the consumer, from the information stored in the personal preference memory 105, can provide the personal preferences.
With the personal preference information 105, context information 114, and information about the products and services 108 that are intended to be purchased, the information is correlated 109 with the preferences and a determination is made to see if the preference rules warrant notification 111, recommending another product 112, blocking the purchase 113, or informing a guardian of a purchase attempt 110. The consumer purchase information is optionally fed back for storage in the personal preference store 105 or third party preference store 101.
The correlation 109 can take into account multiple purchases over a period of time. For example, a guardian may only allow a dependent to have five trips to a fast food restaurant each month, or not allow trips during dinner hours, or may require that only certain menu items or menu items with certain nutritional characteristics may be purchased. The personal preference memory 105 may be in the form of a smart card that is used by the dependent to male purchases, or the dependent's credit card can be used as a key to unlock persistently stored preferences.
A key aspect of the persistent preference store 101 is that it is not under the control of a given retailer. Rather, a third party controls it so that the consumer's preferences are kept private and so that the preferences can be correlated across purchases regardless of where they are made. The persistent store may also be eliminated in favor of only using the consumer controlled personal preference memory 105. In this way, the consumer maintains even more privacy for the preference data. A device controlled by the consumer, so that the retailer never has access to the preference information, may do the correlation of consumer preferences.
Another key aspect of the invention is that the no additional information technology is required to be added to the place of purchase. The storage of preferences and validation can be done remotely without the need for additional equipment, especially if the consumer is identified with nearly ubiquitous credit cards.
There are many possible embodiments for the invention. In some embodiments, consumer preferences are embedded on a computer-readable device such as a bar-coded or RFID card. In other embodiments, consumer preferences are stored in one or more network accessible repositories and are accessed when a consumer provides an identifier such as a RFID tag, an identifier encoded as a barcode, or the identification information such as credit card account number stored on a credit card.
The capabilities of the present invention can be implemented in software, firmware, hardware or some combination thereof.
As one example, one or more aspects of the present invention can be included in an article of manufacture (e.g., one or more computer program products) having, for instance, computer usable media. The media has embodied therein, for instance, computer readable program code means for providing and facilitating the capabilities of the present invention. The article of manufacture can be included as a part of a computer system or sold separately.
Additionally, at least one program storage device readable by a machine, tangibly embodying at least one program of instructions executable by the machine to perform the capabilities of the present invention can be provided.
The flow diagrams depicted herein are just examples. There may be many variations to these diagrams or the steps (or operations) described therein without departing from the spirit of the invention. For instance, the steps may be performed in a differing order, or steps may be added, deleted or modified. All of these variations are considered a part of the claimed invention.
While the preferred embodiment to the invention has been described, it will be understood that those skilled in the art, both now and in the future, may make various improvements and enhancements which fall within the scope of the claims which follow. These claims should be construed to maintain the proper protection for the invention first described.
