Incremental promotion for electronic commerce

An electronic commerce apparatus for offering a promotional award to a visitor of an electronic commerce site, comprising:

• a connection to a distributed communication network;
• a promotional awards storage area, including:
• a visitor identifier storage that contains unique identification information for each visitor to said site,
• a number of previous visits storage that contains information pertaining to prior visits to said site by visitors identified in said visitor identifier storage, and
• an award time storage that stores a time of a last award for each visitor to said site;
• and
• an awards rule storage that stores rules for crediting awards to visitors of said site according to information stored in said visitor parameter storage, said award rule storage including a rule that determines a specific promotional award based on whether a predetermined time period has elapsed since said last award time;
• wherein a visitor of said site is granted a promotional award by retrieving visitor parameter information from said visitor parameter storage corresponding to customer identification information stored in said customer identifier storage in response to visitor identification information provided to said apparatus upon visitor access to said site, and applying retrieved visitor parameter information to award crediting rules retrieved from said awards rule storage.