DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Election/Restrictions
Claims 1-8 are withdrawn from further consideration pursuant to 37 CFR 1.142(b) as being drawn to a nonelected Group I, there being no allowable generic or linking claim. Election was made without traverse in the reply filed on 17 March 2026.
Status of Claims
This is a first action on the merits in response to the Election of claims 9-20 for examination. Claim 9-20 are pending and have been examined.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 20 September 2024 are in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Priority
Applicant claim for the benefit of a prior-filed application under 35 U.S.C. 119(e) or under 35 U.S.C. 120, 121, 365(c), or 386(c) is acknowledged.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 9-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea of collecting, analyzing, and outputting product information for purchase decision making, without significantly more. Independent claim 9 recites a process for tracking and analyzing procurement data.
Independent claim 9 recites the following limitations:
crawling a plurality of data sources selected from among manufacturer data, retail website data, UPC data, catalog data sources, and retailer data dumps to obtain unstructured item data from the plurality of data sources, the unstructured item data being related to a plurality of items in a plurality of commodity groups provided by a plurality of suppliers;
creating a plurality of intermediate data records having a structured form and populated with the unstructured item data from the plurality of data sources;
determining that at least one of the plurality of items is provided by both a first supplier and a second supplier of the plurality of suppliers based on identification information associated with at least one item, the at least one item provided by the first supplier being associated with a field value that does not match a corresponding field value of the at least one item provided by the second supplier;
determining that the field value associated with the at least one item provided by the first supplier has a data quality score higher than a data quality score of the corresponding field value of the at least one item provided by the second supplier;
creating a master record comprising a plurality of item records from the plurality of intermediate data records, each of the plurality of item records having one or more values for one or more of a plurality of predefined attributes, a first item record of the plurality of item records corresponding to the at least one item having a value of the one or more values that corresponds to the field value associated with the at least one item provided by the first supplier;
defining baskets representing common items in a plurality of commodity groups;
tracking, by the processor, pricing for each item of the common items in the baskets for multiple suppliers and averaging the pricing for each supplier to output a blended price for the basket;
tracking percentage changes in the blended price for each of the baskets;
using the blended price for each of the baskets and the percentage changes to create a predictive model to estimate likely price changes over time;
receiving a request to add a specific item of the common items in one of the baskets to a purchase list associated with a user account;
determining, for the specific item, an expected price trend based on the predictive model;
and displaying, in a graphical user interface, a first visual indicator specifying that a lower price is predicted and presenting an option to choose the specific item to add to the purchase list or to replace the specific item in the purchase list.
Under Step 1 of the eligibility analysis independent claim 9 recites at least one step or act including creating a plurality of intermediate data records. Thus the claims fall within one of the statutory categories of invention.
Under Step 2A Prong One, the limitations of claim 9 for crawling a plurality of data sources, creating a plurality of intermediate data records, determining that an item is provided by a first and second supplier, determining an item field value has a higher data quality score, creating a master record comprising a plurality of item records, defining baskets representing common items in a plurality of commodity groups, tracking pricing for each item in the baskets, averaging the pricing for each supplier to output a blended price, tracking percentage changes in the blended price, creating a predictive model to estimate likely price change over time, receiving a request to add a specific item to a purchase list, determining an expected price trend based on the predictive model, and displaying a first visual indicator predicting a lower price and presenting an option to add or replace a specific item to the purchase list, as drafted, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, illustrates a fundamental economic practice of gathering and analyzing transaction and market data for predicting price trends for making item purchase decisions. Narrowing the data collection and analysis steps to a particular type of data and derived output (order initiation or presentation of product/price comparisons) does not render the concept less abstract. Commodity market analysis, price prediction, and transaction support relate to commercial transaction and agreements in the form of contracts, sales activities or behaviors, and business relations. Thus the recited abstract idea of collecting, analyzing, and displaying product sales data for purchasing decision making falls within the fundamental economic practices or principles and commercial interactions categories of certain methods of organizing human activities. See MPEP 2106.04(a)(2)(II). The recited limitations also involve observations, evaluations, and judgments of commodity market data that could be performed mentally or using a pen and paper to aid in purchasing decisions. See MPEP §§ 2106.04(a), 2106.04(a)(2)(III). Therefore, the claim is directed to an abstract idea.
Under Step 2A Prong Two, the judicial exception of claim 9 is not integrated into a practical application. In particular, the claims only recite a processor and interface for performing the recited steps. These elements are recited at a high level of generality (i.e., as a generic processor performing a generic computer function) and amount to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. See MPEP 2106.05(f). For example, Applicant’s specification at paragraph [0049] states: “… the techniques described herein are implemented by at least one computing device. … The computing devices … may include at least one general purpose hardware processor programmed to perform the techniques pursuant to program instructions in firmware, memory, other storage, or a combination.” The Specification does not provide additional details about the processor or interface that would distinguish it from any generic processing devices that communicate with one another in a network environment. Adding generic computer components to perform generic functions, such as data gathering, performing calculations, and outputting a result would not transform the claim into eligible subject matter. See MPEP 2106.05(h).
The step for displaying a first visual indicator and presenting an option to add or replace an item in the purchase list is broadly and generically claimed in a manner that does not integrate the use of the interface into a practical application. Receiving data and displaying/presenting data amounts to insignificant extra solution or post solution activity when the data gathering or output fails to meaningfully limit the claimed invention. Receiving data is merely a data gathering step used to provide input for the data processing steps. Displaying or presenting data for human decision making is merely a presentation of the results of the data collection and analysis. The claim limitations fail to specifically describe or positively recite interaction with the interface that would amount to a practical application. Therefore, the additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea.
Under Step 2B, the claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. As discussed above with respect to the integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, the additional elements of a processor and storage device amount to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using a generic computer component which cannot provide an inventive concept. See MPEP 2106.05.
Dependent claims 10-20 include the abstract ideas of independent claim 9. The limitations of the dependent claims merely narrow the mental process/certain method of organizing human activity abstract idea by describing the type of data received, analyzed, and output to the user. The limitations of the dependent claims are not integrated into a practical application because none of the additional elements set forth any limitations that meaningfully limit the abstract idea implementation. There are no additional elements that transform the claim into a patent eligible idea by amounting to significantly more. The analysis above applies to all statutory categories of invention. Therefore claims 9-20 are ineligible under 35 U.S.C. 101.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 9-20 would be deemed allowable over the prior art if amended to overcome the 35 U.S.C. 101 rejection set forth in this office action.
Examiner analyzed claim 9 in view of the prior art provided in the 20 September 2024 IDS and the prior art search and finds not all claim limitations are explicitly taught nor would one of ordinary skill in the art find it obvious to combine these references with a reasonable expectation of success. The closest prior art includes Finnegan et al. (US 2018/0150869), McGee (US 2003/0144924), Acharya et al. (US 2005/0256759), and Meehan et al. (US 2017/0351752).
Finnegan et al. discloses systems, methods, and program products for identifying and/or providing notification of discounted items for sale. Price monitoring servers may comprise one or more processors operatively connected to one or more databases stored on one or more computer-readable storage devices. Such databases may include item profile table. Item data (e.g., Hukk data), may include creation date, product, store, product style, product url, product id, product title, product description, product images, produce price history with and without promotions, product selections (e.g., size, color, fit), product attributes. The interface may further include a display of price comparisons of exact and/or similar products across a plurality of merchants and/or product recommendations based upon user specific information that is captured or otherwise stored in a database. In embodiments, categories may be provided by the system, e.g., via a drop-down list of predetermined categories, or may be input by a user, e.g., through a data entry field. The item storing window may provide a real-time comparison of prices for variants of the item across one or more merchant websites. In embodiments, the price comparison may be based upon the last-known (e.g., last received or last retrieved) prices from a plurality of merchants. The system may determine whether an item's or product variant's price has changed since the last monitored price. The system searches the database for product variants that are associated with the product variant requested to be tracked by the item storing software based on the matching of a variety of product attributes and/or a variety of other factors.
McGee discloses a database containing product inventory data for multiple suppliers, the system allows a user to search for availability of multiple products in one search query, and the search results will be grouped by supplier. It can be integrated into e-commerce systems in various fields where such functionality would be useful. The search results can be customized further to categorize suppliers by geographic location, pricing or other criteria. Ranking is based on the aggregate results of a series of individual part searches for each part specified in the query with suppliers having the most matches receiving the highest ranking.
Acharya et al. discloses a statistical system and method for filtering sales history to yield two demand series--one that is time insensitive (i.e. function of price and promotional activities only) and another that is price & promotional activities insensitive (i.e. function of temporal factors only). The invention assumes that trend and seasonality effects are uniform over a group of products and markets; hence the decomposition analysis will be done at the aggregate level.
Meehan et al. discloses a spending display, which graphically presents one or more categories of the search results with respect to spending data. The spending data may be presented as a series of color-coded bubbles. Categories and sub-categories may have a same color. Categories may be presented as large bubbles, in which smaller bubbles representing sub-categories may be arranged. In some embodiments, the size of the bubble may correlate with the quantity of spending.
However, Finnegan et al., McGee, Acharya et al., and Meehan et al. taken individually or in a any combination, fail to teach inter alia, the limitations discussed above with respect to independent claim 9. Moreover since the specific ordered combined sequence of claim elements recited in claim 9 can only be found as recited in Applicant’s specification, any combination of the cited references and/or additional references to teach all the claim elements would be the result of impermissible hindsight reconstruction. Accordingly, any combination of the prior art of record and any of the additional references would be improper to teach the claimed invention. As a result, claims 9-20 are eligible over the prior art.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
Ballaro et al. (US 8,065,202) - multi-tenant procurement system, includes an access module to provide access to a plurality of end users associated with an organization to their respective accounts, each account being customized by a super user of the organization, a search engine to execute searches for products offered by one or more suppliers, a transaction module to process and track one or more requisitions generated by the plurality of end users, a business rules module to apply business rules established between the organization and the one or more suppliers to process the requisitions, and a data repository to store data generated on the system.
Williams et al. (US 11,100,555) - performing predictive searches for buyer systems 112 of product data provided by supplier systems 122. Product data can cover any attribute of a product, such as a name, description, a picture, a review, or a price. The server 102 can be programmed to further manage product data collected from supplier systems 122 in one or more local memories or provide an interface for handling search queries for specific products from buyer systems, or communicate with an acquisition system that implements these features.
Musgrove et al. (US 2016/0019611) - processing plural product information records from the product information sources into one or more groups based on which product information records are likely to correspond to the same product, correlating a unique product ID corresponding to the product associated with each of said groups to identify the product, comparing each identified product to categories of a taxonomy to determine a category for the identified products in the taxonomy, and determining attributes for each categorized product based on the product information records corresponding to each group, creating product specifications based on the determined attributes and storing the product specification in the corresponding determined categories of the taxonomy.
Jacobi et al. (US 2006/0195362) - analyzes purchase histories and/or other types of behavioral data of users on an aggregated basis to detect and quantify associations between particular items represented in an electronic catalog. The detected associations are stored in a mapping structure that maps items to related items, and is used to recommend items to users of the electronic catalog. The items may include products and/or categories of products.
Godsey (US 9,552,597) - items listed on any website or app may be added to one or more containers (hereinafter “folders”) through functionality such as drag-and-drop or buttons. When an item is added to a folder, logic in the folder may cause the folder to interface with the website or app on which the item was listed to extract or retrieve data (including metadata) related to the item. This data may be used to populate the file corresponding to the item, in some embodiments, the folder may contain logic that enables the folder to continually update the data concerning the item. The folder may offer various actions that may be performed with respect to the item. For example, a user may decide to buy an item from the folder, thereby resulting in the eCFS interfacing with the website to consummate the purchase of the item.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to LETORIA G KNIGHT whose telephone number is (571)270-0485. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 9am-5pm.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Rutao WU can be reached at 571-272-6045. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/L.G.K/Examiner, Art Unit 3623 /RUTAO WU/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 3623
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