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Merchants Using Smart Shopper

Two merchants participating in the Smart Commerce Solutions Smart Shopper smart card program are Harvest Festival, a grocery store, and Scrivener’s Corner, which sells books on the World Wide Web. Both of these merchants have chosen to offer a frequent buyer points loyalty scheme. In addition, Harvest Festival offers the cumulative purchasing scheme and Scrivener’s Corner offers the want list scheme.

The frequent buyer points program provided by Smart Commerce Solutions to merchants participating in the Smart Shopper smart card program maintains a running point total of the amount of business the customer does with the merchant. The units of this point total can be dollars, visits, or any other metric chosen by the merchant. The total is incremented after every transaction with the merchant, and the points accumulated can be redeemed with the merchant however the merchant chooses.

The cumulative purchasing program provided by Smart Commerce Solutions and offered by Harvest Festival lets the customer enter a list of individual products for which she wants to track long-term purchasing totals. Each time one of these products is purchased, the cumulative amount of money the customer has spent on that product is increased. The customer may wish to do this for budgeting purposes or to be able to demonstrate her personal buying power in order to negotiate special volume purchases of a product.

The want list program provided by Smart Commerce Solutions and offered by Scrivener’s Corner lets customers enter a list of books or book types they are seeking. When Scrivener’s accesses the card from its Web server, it will access this list and cross-check it against its current inventory. The Web server will then prepare a page that makes ordering of any hits quick and easy.

Smart Commerce Solutions knows that the success of the Smart Shopper card depends critically on protecting the data security, privacy, and accuracy concerns of all program stakeholders: merchants, customers, and Smart Commerce Solutions itself. As a result, Smart Commerce Solutions has made explicit the security properties of the card program it intends to implement and enforce:

  A lost or stolen Smart Shopper card cannot be used by the person or organization that is not the rightful owner. In particular, no protected data on the card can be viewed or altered.
  It should not be possible to forge a Smart Shopper card. All program software should work only with genuine Smart Shopper smart card program cards.
  It should not be possible to forge Smart Shopper application programs. The Smart Shopper card should not allow itself to be altered or updated by anything other than genuine Smart Shopper application programs.
  The cardholder has complete control over what personal preference information Harvest Festival and Scrivener’s Corner can access. The customer should be able to make different personal preference information available to each.

Scenarios for Using Smart Shopper

In order to test the design of the Smart Shopper smart card program, consider the following usage scenarios:

  Tracking purchases and collecting frequent buyer points: Alice has just purchased a basket of groceries at Harvest Festival and is at the cash register checking out. She inserts her Smart Shopper card into the smart card reader at the checkout counter. The reader is connected to the cash register and via a network to a server in the back office. When Alice inserts her card, the server reads her cumulative purchasing list off the card. As the items in her grocery basket are scanned, the server cross-checks the universal product codes (UPCs) on Alice’s list against the scanned code, and when it finds a match, updates the cumulative purchasing figure on Alice’s card with the amount of money spent against the code on this trip to the store. After all the groceries in Alice’s basket have been rung up, the cash register updates the frequent buyer total on Alice’s card to reflect her purchases during this trip to the store.
  Using personal preferences and spending frequent buyer points: Bob inserts his Smart Shopper card into the smart card reader attached to his home computer, connects to the Internet, and picks the Scrivener’s Corner home page from his bookmark list. The Java applet sent to Bob’s WWW browser off the Scrivener’s home page reads the want list off Bob’s card and sends it back to the Scrivener’s server. The server quickly matches Bob’s list against Scrivener’s book inventory so that when the home page itself is downloaded to Bob’s browser, it includes a handy order form of books on Bob’s preference list. Since all of Bob’s billing, shipping, and payment information is also on his Smart Shopper card, all Bob would have to do is check the books he wants and select Done. In this particular case, however, besides the books he wants, Bob also checks the Use Scrivener’s Points box, which means that the Scrivener’s Corner frequent buyer points total on Bob’s card will be set to zero and all the points that were there are applied toward his purchase. After he selects the Done button, the books are on their way.
  Browsing and editing the Smart Shopper card: While shopping at Harvest Festival, Alice passes a Smart Shopper customer service kiosk. She inserts her Smart Shopper card and gets a display of each of the merchant programs on her card, together with her current frequent buyer point holdings in each. When she selects the Purchase Tracking button, she gets a display of the products whose cumulative purchasing she is tracking, together with the total amount spent to date on each product. She can use the mouse and the keyboard on the kiosk to delete items and add new items to her purchase tracking list.


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