Method of Driving Traffic From a Mobile Wireless Device to an E-Commerce Site and Tracking that Traffic

Abstract

An entity registers as an affiliate of an e-commerce site and then publishes information that promotes that WWW e-commerce site; an end-user with a mobile wireless device, sees that information and as a consequence sends a request to a remote server that can interact with the e-commerce site under control inputs from an application running on the device. The request includes data that uniquely defines the affiliate. This approach makes is easy to become an affiliate able to drive traffic from a mobile wireless device to a WWW e-commerce site; this is based on the re-use of existing affiliate management systems (previously not thought relevant to the m-commerce environment). Further, the mechanism for creating traffic for a WWW e-commerce site is easy; it just involves an affiliate publishing certain information. Still further, it is easy to track interactions between a mobile wireless device and a WWW e-commerce site and link them to appropriate affiliates; this is again based on the re-use of existing affiliate management systems (previously not thought relevant to the m-commerce environment). Finally, it is easy to pay affiliates, as well as the infrastructure operator that runs the remote server, since both can be paid using the existing affiliate management systems (again, previously not thought relevant to the m-commerce environment).

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.