Systems and methods for conducting electronic commerce transactions requiring micropayment
First Claim
1. A method for conducting electronic commerce transactions between a user and a plurality of vendors offering tangible goods, content, or services for rental or sale at a plurality of vendor web sites, the method comprising:
- issuing a plurality of electronic tokens from a micropayment service provider server of a micropayment service provider to a user suitable for use in micropayment transactions;
providing a micropayment user account to the user, each micropayment user account in the plurality of micropayment accounts storing a subset of the electronic tokens purchased with a different currency;
providing a micropayment vendor account to each one of the plurality of vendors for settling payments for electronic tokens used by the user;
facilitating the purchase of tangible goods, content, or services from one or more of the plurality of vendors without the user having to disclose personal information to one or more of the plurality of vendors; and
for each electronic transaction between the user and a vendor, recording a royalty transaction in a corresponding micropayment vendor account.
2 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
Systems and methods for conducting electronic commerce using electronic tokens are described. The electronic tokens are issued and maintained by a micropayment service provider. Tangible goods, content or services offered by member vendors can be purchased or rented using the electronic tokens. A vendor and a user security means is provided to prevent unauthorized use of the user'"'"'s account to purchase content, to prevent unauthorized downloading of content from a vendor web site and to prevent unauthorized change of transaction data. Settlement of payments between the micropayment service provider and the vendor is aggregated and may be performed upon reaching pre-determined amount or time thresholds, thus reducing transaction costs.
525 Citations
44 Claims
-
1. A method for conducting electronic commerce transactions between a user and a plurality of vendors offering tangible goods, content, or services for rental or sale at a plurality of vendor web sites, the method comprising:
-
issuing a plurality of electronic tokens from a micropayment service provider server of a micropayment service provider to a user suitable for use in micropayment transactions;
providing a micropayment user account to the user, each micropayment user account in the plurality of micropayment accounts storing a subset of the electronic tokens purchased with a different currency;
providing a micropayment vendor account to each one of the plurality of vendors for settling payments for electronic tokens used by the user;
facilitating the purchase of tangible goods, content, or services from one or more of the plurality of vendors without the user having to disclose personal information to one or more of the plurality of vendors; and
for each electronic transaction between the user and a vendor, recording a royalty transaction in a corresponding micropayment vendor account. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44)
-
-
17. A system for conducting electronic commerce transactions between a user and a plurality of vendors offering tangible goods, content, or services for rental or sale at a plurality of vendor web sites, without the user having to disclose personal information to one or more of the plurality of vendors, the system comprising:
-
a micropayment service provider server;
a micropayment account user interface; and
a micropayment vendor application program interface.
-
Specification