Apparatus for printing, displaying, and managing documents, digital content, advertising, social media, mobile catalogues and the like for retail premises, and system thereof

A retail ticketing system comprising:

• a database system including user or store profiles, retail ticket templates, customer information, and credential tokens of a user or store;
• a user interface arranged for use on a terminal client device, the user interface including a retail ticketing interface, a digital signage interface, a mobile catalogue interface, an online advertisement interface, a contextual advertisement interface, and a business intelligence interface;
• and
• a retail ticketing and digital signage server in network communication with the database system and one or more terminal client devices including the user interface;
• the retail ticketing and digital signage server including:
• a processing unit including a memory and queues;
• a web services server controlled by the processing unit for receiving event messages, receiving credential tokens, generating a response to a terminal client device including sending a credential token to the terminal client device or denying access to the terminal client device, and delivering presentation data to the terminal client device, the presentation data including retail tickets, digital presentations, real-time personalized store catalogues, advertisements, consumer information, and business reports;
• a credential server controlled by the processing unit for receiving a processed credential access requests from the web services server, verifying the credential access requests, retrieving a credential token from the database system, and passing the credential token to the web services server to generate the response to the terminal client device;
• a profile management server controlled by the processing unit for storing and retrieving the user or store profiles, ticket templates, and customer information to and from the database system;
• working modules controlled by the processing unit and including:
• a ticketing module, associated with the retail ticketing interface, for printing the retail tickets;
• a difference engine module, associated with the retail ticketing interface, for determining whether a retail ticket should be printed;
• a digital signage module, associated with the digital signage interface, for generating the digital presentation for display on devices at a store location;
• a mobile catalogue module, associated with the mobile catalogue interface, for generating the real-time personalized store catalogue for display to a customer mobile device;
• an online advertising module, associated with the online advertisement interface and including a social media application programming interface, for generating the advertisement;
• a context advertising module, associated with the context advertising interface, for collecting the customer information;
• and
• a business intelligence module, associated with the business intelligence interface, to perform data analysis for generating the business reports;
• a message broker controlled by the processing unit, wherein the message broker is adapted to receive event messages from the terminal client device, assign the event messages to a queue of the processing unit, schedule to distribute the event messages to one or more of the working modules for processing by a corresponding one of the working modules;
• the business intelligence module adapted to:
• learn a type of point of sale system associated with each store location;
• decide, based upon the type of point of sale system at a corresponding one of each store location, whether to use, for collecting data from the point of sale system, a push application programming interface, a pull application programming interface, or a data agent;
• the data being schema-free;
• and
• collect the data using the decided push or pull application program interface or the data agent;
• wherein, the working modules further comprise an automated merchandising intelligence module adapted to perform real-time monitoring of the data collected from the point of sale system and a back office system adapted to determine what, where and when to advertise in the ticketing module and the digital signage module;
• wherein the ticketing module and the digital signage module are adapted to directly draw the data collected from the point of sale system and the back office system via the message broker;
• and
• wherein the difference engine module is adapted to accept a customisable script file within an implementation layer that allows integrators to perform customer-specific business logic whenever an entity within the database changes.