Systems and Methods for Recommending Third Party Products and Services

A system for providing recommendations to a user for a plurality of third party products and services, the system comprising:

• a product engine for ranking the third party products and services based on one or more factors;
• a profile engine for generating a user profile based on one or more user-related factors;
• a location engine for determining appropriate third party products and services from the ranked third party products and services based on a geographical location associated with the user;
• a filtering engine for filtering the ranked third party products and services based on the user profile, and based on the appropriate third party products and services determined from the geographical location of the user;
• and
• an output engine for providing the user with one or more optimal third party products and services extracted from the filtered third party products and services.

In a system for facilitating purchase by users of third party products and services offered by one or more third party product and service providers, wherein the third party products and services correspond to geographical locations associated with the users, a method for identifying optimal third party products and services for a user, comprising the steps of:

• receiving product/service information corresponding to a plurality of product/services offered by the one or more third party product and service providers, wherein the product/service information includes a plurality of parameters, each product/service including one or more parameters;
• standardizing the plurality of parameters based on one or more predefined rules;
• assigning a predefined weight to each of the plurality of standardized parameters;
• calculating a composite score for each product/service offered by the one or more third party product and service providers based on the standardised parameters and predefined weights associated with each product/service;
• and
• generating one or more optimal product/service recommendations for the user based on the composite score for each product/service according to a predefined ranking scheme,
• whereby the one or more optimal product/service recommendations are used to suggest one or more products or services to the user that best fit the user's needs.