Electronic commerce portal

An e-commerce management computer-executable program embodied on a computer readable medium comprising:

• a web site authoring module to enable a merchant to build and modify a merchant web site linked to a page of a portal, where,
• the web site authoring module has functionality to enable the merchant to select products or services to be associated with a buyer incentive, and, the web site authoring module interacts with the portal to cause the buyer incentive to be displayed on the merchant web site and on one or more pages of the portal according to pre-determined portal rules.

An electronic commerce portal system for providing collection of interlinked electronic commerce portals, the electronic commerce portals enabling electronic commerce over the World Wide Web, each portal comprising:

• a portal web site and a collection of merchant web sites linked to the portal, and merchant tools to build and maintain merchant web sites;
• wherein the tools include functionality to allow merchants to select products and services to be offered with an associated buyer incentive, and wherein the portal operates to cause the buyer incentives to be displayed on the merchant web site and on a page of the portal web site according to pre-determined portal rules,
• where, the portal rules determine which portal the buyer incentive is to be displayed on.