US 6,556,975 B1Granted

Computer system and method for providing an on-line mall

OwnerL. William Wittscheinventor

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Abstract

A computer system and method for providing an on-line mall. An on-line mall environment is provided. The on-line mall environment is partitioned into at least one community and having at least one store in each community. Each store is made available to a merchant to occupy. The merchant may customize the store by providing for storage on the on-line mall sight design data and merchandise data. Customers access the on-line mall through a remote location. The customers may connect with the on-line mall website through direct connection to the on-line mall or through links provided by other websites. Customer specific data is stored on the on-line mall allowing the customer to enter purchasing data one time for the many stores in each community. Customer purchasing selections are stored and submitted to the mechant on standard intervals.

Claims24

Dependent claims

A method for providing an on-line mall to two or more customers, the method comprising the steps of:

providing a mall environment on-line, the mall environment including a data storage device;
providing two or more stores within the mall environment, where each store is associated with one of two or more communities;
providing customer access to the two or more stores;
providing a discussion forum for the customers;
providing a plurality of gift registries, where each gift registry is associated with at least one of any store of any community within the on-line mall;
providing access to each gift registry o one or more registrants, so that the registrant can select one or more gifts for We gift registry;
receiving purchase data from the customer for each of the two or more stores based on data received by the customers from the discussion forum and the gift registry;
and
processing the purchase data through a single system.

6 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.