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Consumers can purchase a Smart Shopper card at any participating merchant, or on the Smart Commerce Solutions Web site. When the card is purchased at a participating merchant, the merchant can load on the card his own program, but not programs of other merchants. When the card is purchased through the Smart Commerce Solutions Web site, the consumer can load the loyalty programs of any of the participating merchants from the Web site.
Consumers can also, at their discretion, add their own personal data both to the master personal data file in the master file and to any personal data files in the merchant directories. Some merchants may offer this capability as part of the card purchase, but others may not. For example, Harvest Festival doesnt want customers personalizing their new Smart Shopper card in the checkout lane because it would hold up other customers waiting to check out. Harvest Festival does offer a Smart Shopper card kiosk near the customer service window. For those merchants who dont offer this capability and for consumers whod like to personalize their cards in the privacy of their home or office, Smart Commerce Solutions provides Smart Shopper card personalization forms on the Smart Commerce Solutions World Wide Web site.
Beside enabling the consumer to purchase and personalize a new Smart Shopper card, the Smart Commerce Solutions Web site contains a number of utilities to browse and update an in-use Smart Shopper card over the Internet.
To use the Smart Commerce Solutions Web utilities, the customer inserts his Smart Shopper card into the smart card reader on his personal computer or into the smart card slot on his network computer. When Smart Commerce Solutionss Smart Shopper home page is contacted, a Java applet is downloaded to the customers Web broswer. This applet is the connection between the customers Smart Shopper card and the Smart Commerce Solutions Web server. Figure 10.2 shows the general flow of information between the Smart Commerce Solutions server and the customers card.
Figure 10.2. The process of updating a Smart Shopper card on the Web.
A session begins with the Smart Commerce Solutions applet reading the current data from the Smart Shopper card and sending it encrypted to the Smart Commerce Solutions WWW server. The server then prepares a hierarchy of forms containing this data, which is sent to the customer on demand for editing and updating. When the customer has completed all editing, new and changed data are downloaded back to the Smart Shopper smart card via the Smart Commerce Solutions browser applet.
Smart Commerce Solutions maintains the Smart Shopper server as a service to both customers and merchants. Customers can use the server from home or office. Web merchants can point to the server from their own servers. Retail merchants can place Smart Shopper customer service kiosks in their retail locations.
The Smart Commerce Solutions applet is not specific to the Smart Commerce Solutions server, but rather is a general-purpose connection between any WWW participating merchant server and the Smart Shopper card. It accepts commands from an application on the WWW server to read and return data from the card, or to add or update data on the card. Smart Commerce Solutions provides this general-purpose applet to help merchants develop Web-based services and Web-based loyalty schemes.
Smart Commerce Solutions also uses the WWW server to collect data on customer merchant loyalty program preferences. Statistics are gathered both on which merchant programs customers are loading on their cards and which loyalty schemes are most attractive to customers. This information is sent to participating merchants as part of their participation package. All data is summarized just like census data so individual customers cannot be identified. Furthermore, data is sent to the merchant encrypted with the merchants public key so that only the merchant can decrypt and read it.
Finally, Smart Commerce Solutions distributes on disk and as a download from its Web site a free Windows program that Smart Shopper cardholders can use to browse and edit their Smart Shopper smart cards.
The Smart Shopper card Browser is a standalone Windows program that lets cardholders view, edit, and update information on their Smart Shopper cards. The program is written in Visual C++ and is provided free to Smart Shopper cardholders by Smart Commerce Solutions. It is built on top of a Multiflex 3K application programming interface library written to PC/SC specifications. The source code for the library and the card browser program are included on the CD-ROM that accompanies this book.
There are two Harvest Festival Smart Shopper application programs. The first and primary Harvest Festival Smart Shopper program updates both the frequent buyer points file and the cumulative purchases file (see Figure 10.3). This program is integrated with the check-out line system so that updates to a customers Smart Shopper card occur as an integral part of normal check-out. The primary application will also allow a customer to use frequent buyer points in paying for a purchase. The second application program makes volume discount offers to the customer based on the cumulative purchasing totals stored on the card. The cardholder can access this program at a kiosk near the customer service window and on the Harvest Festival Web site.
Figure 10.3. Harvest Festival checkout counter processing for updating the Smart Shopper card.
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