US 8,620,739 B1Granted

Dynamic conversion and use of non-monetary rewards

AssigneeAmazon Technologies, Inc.

InventorsRobert Frederick, Toni R. Reid Thomelin, Eugene Wei

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Abstract

Techniques are described for using loyalty program points and other non-monetary loyalty rewards from a first organization in a monetary manner at a distinct second organization, such as to acquire an item from a merchant at a cost that is reduced by a monetary amount based on the loyalty reward used. In some situations, the first organization programmatically interacts with a merchant to cause a gift certificate to be dynamically created for the merchant in an appropriate monetary amount, and later applies the gift certificate to reduce the cost of the item acquisition. In addition, in some situations such acquiring of items by a user from a merchant is performed based on interactions between the user and the merchant that are performed so as to appear to the user to be with the first organization and such that subsequent interactions continue between the user and the first organization.

Claims66

Dependent claims

A computer-implemented method for a merchant to dynamically use non-monetary loyalty rewards of a distinct organization to facilitate provision of items from the merchant, the method comprising:

receiving in a computing system of a merchant an indication to use with the merchant a specified non-monetary loyalty reward of an organization distinct from the merchant, the indication being received from a distinct computing system of the organization to initiate dynamic creation by the merchant of a gift certificate associated with the merchant that corresponds to the specified non-monetary loyalty reward, and the specified non-monetary loyalty reward being associated with a user affiliated with the organization;
automatically determining a monetary value for the merchant to associate with the specified loyalty reward;
in response to the received indication and under control of a computing system of the merchant,
dynamically enabling use of the determined monetary value for acquiring items from the merchant, the dynamic enabling including dynamically creating the gift certificate to have a specified monetary amount based on the determined monetary value;
and
providing an indication of the dynamically created gift certificate to enable use of the dynamically created gift certificate;
and
after receiving an instruction from the computing system of the organization to use the created gift certificate as part of acquiring one or more indicated items from the merchant for the user, applying at least a portion of the specified monetary amount from the created gift certificate to reduce a price for the acquiring of the one or more indicated items from the merchant.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.