Sellers of goods and services often use computer systems to manage their operations. Some of them use product ordering and fulfillment applications to store data representing their products, to maintain data of product inventory as it changes over time, to manage data regarding their customers (including for example, an identification of which products are eligible for purchase by each customer) and to maintain price books, which determine what prices are to be offered to individual customers.
Sellers often seek to find alternative ways to sell their products. Recently, interest has developed in automated auctions for products. Automated auction systems typically are maintained by an auctioneering authority, a company which has no predetermined affiliation with various sellers who use the conventional product ordering and fulfillment applications. While sellers can manually open auctions and define terms under which they will sell their products in an auction, the manual operations are cumbersome. They do not provide a convenient means for a seller to identify its products and publish information about them and they do not integrate with the data structures already available to sellers via the product ordering and fulfillment centers that many of them maintain on their own. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an enterprise system providing an auction system that is integrated with seller's product ordering and fulfillment systems. There is a need in the art for such a system that provides secure communication between the auction system and the product ordering and fulfillment systems. There further is a need in the art for such an integrated system that provides a monitoring tool to permit sellers to review, control and possibly modify auctions as they occur.
Embodiments of the present invention introduce an administrative tool for auction systems in which auction sellers are permitted to monitor, access and modify their instructions. An enterprise network includes a communication manager, a product ordering/fulfillment application to respond to electronic product purchase requests and initiate fulfillment thereof, the product ordering/fulfillment manager supported by a database representing products available for purchase, an auction manager to manage on-line auctions of products and to respond to electronic bids submitted for products available for purchase, the auction manager supported by a database storing auction records representing the on-line auctions, the auction records including pointers to products from the database of the product ordering/fulfillment manager. A monitoring tool integrated with the auction manager provides statistical information of the on-line auctions to an enterprise representative and permits the representative to control select auctions.
A seller may engage an auction monitor unit via a portal-based communication session between a client terminal and a server. In this system, the client and terminal would be members of a common enterprise network. When the seller engages the server, the auction monitor unit presents an introductory page from which the seller may navigate to additional monitoring tools. One of the most basic monitoring tools provides an opportunity to search for and display auctions that meet selection criteria.
Displays of both the search screen and the search results screen may include tabs 220, 230 to permit an operator to navigate between the screens as desired and to identify which of the two screens is active at each moment in time.
The detail view 300 also may provide a number of action buttons 310.1-310.5 representing actions that may be performed on the auction record. In the example of
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In some cases, bids made under the auction may qualify one or more bidders as the winner of the auction. Auctions may be defined as an automatic type or a manual type.
If an auction is defined as an automatic type, the system may select a winning bid on its own. Typically, the auction record identifies terms that each bid must satisfy to be eligible to win the auction. For example, the auction may specify a minimum price (called the “reserve”) that must be bid to be eligible to win the auction. The auction record also may define a priority system through which to select one bid from all the eligible bids as the winning bid. Typically, eligible bids are evaluated based on price—the bid with the highest bid price often is the winning bid.
When a winning bid is identified for an auction, a corresponding auction record may be supplemented to reflect the winner. The detail view of the monitoring tool also may be amended to reflect that a winning bid has been identified.
As noted, the foregoing monitoring tools and user interfaces may be provided on behalf of an integrated enterprise network operated by a common entity.
The servers 1020 execute applications to manage operations of the seller. Operators (employees of the seller) typically manage server operating by logging into the servers 1020 via the terminals 1010 in portal-based communication sessions and entering commands to the servers to control their operation.
The servers 1020 may execute applications representing a communication manager 1040, an auction manager 1050 and a product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060. The communication manager 1040 controls communication with the terminals. When responses to operator commands are required, the communication manager 1040 generates portal pages and delivers them to the terminals. For example, the communication manager delivers portal pages representing the various user interfaces illustrated in
The auction manager 1050 is an application that generates and administers auctions. The auction manager 1050 generates data records representing parameters of the various auctions maintained by the seller and stores data representing each auction's status. Similarly, the auction manager 1050 stores data representing bids received from various bidder (via a communication process not shown) and, where appropriate, identifies a winning bids for the auctions. Data records representing each auction may be stored in a dedicated auction database.
The product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060 may manage other sales activity of a seller. For example, sellers often offer products for retail sale or for sale to distributors and other channel partners. Product ordering and fulfillment managers 1060 may field electronic purchase requests filed by buyers, may compare orders contained in the requests against data records representing current inventories of a seller's products and initiate fulfillment of the orders if they can be filled. To that extent, product ordering and fulfillment managers 1060 may include functionality to manage data of product inventory, to manage billing and to manage product fulfillment. The product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060 may operate upon data representing a seller's product catalog, which contains data on each product, and may store one or more ‘price books’ representing the prices offered for the seller's products. Additionally, the product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060 may operate data representing the seller's customers their ordering history to determine, for example, which products each customer is eligible to review and what prices are to be charged to each customer for the. seller's products.
The product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060 may generate data records representing the seller's products, its current inventory, price books and customer data. Such data records may be stored, for example, in database 1065.
In one embodiment, the product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060 may be a customer relationship management application
For ease of illustration, the monitoring tool of the foregoing embodiments is illustrated as a unit 1070 separate from the auction manager 1050. In many instances, however, the monitoring tool 1070 may be provided as a function module within the auction manager 1050. It may be provided as a fully integrated component of the auction manager 1050.
As noted, the auction manager 1050 and the product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060 may be provided in a common enterprise network. As such, the auction manager 1050 and product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060 may be integrated in a manner that previously has not been possible in auction systems. For example, rather than store product information expressly in an auction record, auction records in the present system may include pointers to corresponding product records maintained by the product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060. Additionally, an auction may be defined to be contingent upon events that can only be determined by the product ordering and fulfillment manager 1060, such as numbers of units currently held in inventory. Accordingly, the integrated system is believed to provide an advance over prior systems where no such integration is possible.
Several embodiments of the present invention are specifically illustrated and described herein. However, it will be appreciated that modifications and variations of the present invention are covered by the above teachings and within the purview of the appended claims without departing from the spirit and intended scope of the invention.
Number | Date | Country | |
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60731258 | Oct 2005 | US |