TWI776711B - System, method, and computer program product for managing group-purchase orders - Google Patents

Abstract

A method for managing group-purchase orders is provided and allows seller devices to establish multiple management groups. Each management group includes multiple community groups. After buyer devices send order information to a server, the server merges the order information from different community groups but belonging to the same buyer device, and merges the order information from different management groups but belonging to the same buyer device. The server also provides an option to the seller devices on a management platform to merge the order information from different buyer devices.

Description

Group purchase order management system, method and computer program product

This disclosure relates to an order management system and method for online group buying.

In recent years, online shopping has become more and more popular, including group shopping (referred to as group buying), in which the seller gathers enough buyers to buy or use the seller's items, coupons or services at a discounted price . However, sellers may sell goods on multiple social platforms, and how to manage orders from buyers is a topic of concern to those skilled in the art.

An embodiment of the present disclosure provides a group purchase order management system, including a server, a buyer device, and a seller device. The server is used to provide a management platform. The seller device is used to establish a plurality of management groups through the management platform, and each management group includes a plurality of community groups. The buyer devices are respectively used to join the community group according to the community account. The seller's device is used to publish the product information link in the community group, and the buyer's device opens the purchase interface provided by the server through the product information link. And the buyer's device transmits the order information to the server through the purchase interface. The server is used for merging order information from different community groups but belonging to the same buyer device, and merging order information from different management groups but belonging to the same buyer device. The server is also used to provide an option to the seller's device on the management platform for merging order information from different buyer's devices.

In some embodiments, the server is further configured to establish a hierarchical group buying structure, and the hierarchical group buying structure includes a plurality of levels, and each level includes a seller device and at least one buyer device. The server is used to collect order information of all buyer devices in the hierarchy, and transmit the cash flow information or logistics information in the order information to the seller device of the highest level.

In some embodiments, the server is used to link the commodity information generated by the highest-level seller device to the lower-level seller device.

In some embodiments, the server is further configured to join a virtual robot in the community group. The virtual robot inputs a plurality of information of the buyer's device into the first neural network to generate a state feature vector, and converts the corresponding seller's device's information to the first neural network. The information is input to the second neural network to generate an action feature vector, and the inner product of the state feature vector and the action feature vector is calculated as an output value. The server is also used to determine the reward value according to whether the seller's device accepts the order, calculate the error between the reward value and the output value, and train the first neural network and the second neural network according to the back-propagation method.

In some embodiments, when the corresponding seller device receives the order, the virtual robot sets the reward value to be positive. When the seller device rejects the order, the virtual robot sets the reward value to be negative. Otherwise, the reward value is calculated according to the following mathematical formula.

A is the action set, a' is the candidate action feature vector in the action set, and the candidate action feature vector represents a response message. sk ₊₁ is the next state feature vector, Q ( sk ₊₁ , a' ) is the inner product between the state feature vector sk ₊₁ and the candidate action feature vector a' .

From another perspective, an embodiment of the present disclosure provides a group purchase order management method, which is executed by a server. The group purchase order management method includes: providing a management platform to a plurality of seller devices to establish a plurality of management groups, wherein each management group includes a plurality of community groups, and the plurality of buyer devices are respectively used to join the community groups according to the community accounts group; provide a purchase interface, whereby the seller's device publishes a product information link in the community group, and the buyer's device opens the purchase interface through the product information link; and receives order information from the buyer's device, merging from different community groups but belonging to the same For the order information of the buyer's device, the order information from different management groups but belonging to the same buyer's device is merged, and an option is provided to the seller's device in the management platform for merging the order information from different buyer's devices.

From another perspective, an embodiment of the present disclosure provides a computer program product, which is executed by a computer system to implement the above-mentioned group purchase order management method.

110: Server

121~123: Seller's device

141~143: Management group

151~153, 161~163: Community groups

171~173: Buyer's installation

200: User Interface

300: Interface

310: Product information link

400: Purchase interface

500: Hierarchical group buying structure

501, 502, 503: Vendor installations

511~517: Buyer's device

L1~L3: level

601~603: Steps

In order to make the above-mentioned features and advantages of the present invention more obvious and easy to understand, the following embodiments are given and described in detail with the accompanying drawings as follows.

FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram illustrating a group purchase order management system according to an embodiment.

FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram illustrating an interface of a management platform according to an embodiment.

FIG. 3 is a schematic diagram illustrating an interface of a LINE group according to an embodiment.

FIG. 4 is a schematic diagram illustrating a purchase interface according to an embodiment.

FIG. 5 is a schematic diagram illustrating a hierarchical group buying structure according to an embodiment.

FIG. 6 is a flowchart illustrating a group purchase order management method according to an embodiment.

FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram illustrating a group purchase order management system according to an embodiment. Referring to FIG. 1 , the group purchase order management system includes a server 110 , a plurality of seller devices 121 - 123 and a plurality of buyer devices 171 - 173 . The seller devices 121 to 123 and the buyer devices 171 to 173 can be smart phones, tablet computers, personal computers, or any electronic devices that have computing capabilities and can be connected to the Internet. The server 110 provides a management platform, and the seller devices 121-123 can use the management platform through a browser or an application program to manage the orders from the buyer devices 171-173. For example, the management platform will provide a user interface. As shown in FIG. 2, the user interface 200 allows the seller to browse the current orders and view related information. However, FIG. 2 is only an example, and the present disclosure does not limit the user interface. Content.

Each seller device 121-123 can manage its own orders through the management platform. Taking the seller device 123 as an example, the seller device 123 can establish multiple management groups 141-143. For example, the seller may sell products from multiple countries, and the seller can establish a management group for each country's products. The management group 141 can be called "Japan Pavilion", and the management group 142 can be called "Korea Pavilion". By analogy, in some embodiments, each management group 141-143 may also to be called a "store". Each management group 141-143 includes a plurality of community groups, for example, the management group 141 includes community groups 151-153, and the management group 142 includes community groups 161-163. These community groups can be LINE groups, LINE communities, Facebook fan pages, Facebook groups, other online platforms such as Shopee, etc., which is not limited in this disclosure. Here, each kind of social software may have more than one community group, for example, there may be multiple LINE groups under the same management group. Buyer devices 171-173 can join these community groups 151-153 and 161-163 according to their own community accounts. The same buyer device can join multiple community groups, for example, the buyer device 172 joins the community groups 152 and 161 , and the buyer device 173 joins the community groups 162 and 163 .

The group buying methods for different community groups are described here. If the community group is a LINE group or a LINE community, the seller device 123 may publish a product information link in the corresponding community group, and the product information link may be a message in a conversation or a picture link or the like. For example, FIG. 3 shows the interface 300 of the LINE group, and the product information link 310 is presented in the dialogue in the form of pictures. The buyer's device can click on the product information link 310 to open the purchase interface 400 provided by the server 110 (as shown in FIG. 4 , but FIG. 4 is only an example, the present disclosure does not limit the content of the purchase interface), and the buyer device can select the product The buyer's device can send order information to the server 110 through the purchase interface 400 (for example, by pressing the OK button), and the order information can include the specification and quantity of the product, the buyer's account number, the delivery address, The payment amount, payment method, etc., are not limited in this disclosure.

In some embodiments, the server 110 can add a virtual robot to the LINE group, and the virtual robot can create order information according to the conversation in the community group. For example, the virtual robot can obtain the keyword of the product from the information provided by the seller's device, such as the specification of the product, and the virtual robot will also obtain the buyer's message, and determine whether the message contains the keyword of the above specification, "+", "plus", etc. represent the symbols or words to be purchased, as well as the quantity to be purchased. If the information is complete, the virtual robot will automatically create order information. For example, the buyer can leave a message "size M, +1", the virtual robot will automatically capture such a dialogue and create a corresponding order, where the specification is "size M" and the quantity is 1.

If the community group is a Facebook fan page or a Facebook community, the seller device can post a post with information about the item for sale. Buyers can decide whether to buy or not by leaving a message, such as "size M, +1" and so on. The server 110 can automatically retrieve the message from the buyer's device and create order information through the programming language of the web page, such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

If the community group is Shopee, etc., these online platforms may provide a shopping information application programming interface (API), through which the server 110 can retrieve the specification, quantity, address, etc. of the order. .

However, in some situations the buyer may give ambiguous messages, such as leaving "+1" without deciding on the size, or the buyer may not use customary language, such as leaving "I want to buy a size M", such a situation The next virtual robot can use machine learning models to automatically generate dialogue or response messages, thereby inquiring about some missing information from buyers. Specifically, a neural network-like network and reinforcement learning can be combined here. In reinforcement learning, it is generally necessary to define a state set S, an action set A, and a reward r. In some conventional techniques, a state s in the state set S and an action a in the action set are input into a neural network to calculate the value of such a combination (s, a). However, in the present disclosure, two neural networks are used to process the state s and the action a respectively. Specifically, the virtual robot can first capture past conversations between the seller's device and the buyer's device, and input the messages sent by the buyer's device into the first neural network to generate a state feature vector, denoted as s. In addition, the virtual robot will also input the information sent by the seller's device into the second neural network to generate an action feature vector, denoted as a. The above-mentioned first neural network and second neural network are, for example, a long short-term memory model (Long Short-Term Memory, LSTM), or other types of recurrent neural network (recurrent neural network, RNN). The outputs of the first neural network and the second neural network can be combined together. In this embodiment, the inner product between the action feature vector a and the state feature vector s is calculated as the output of the entire network architecture.

An action set A can be established according to the messages outputted by the seller's device. Each action in this set A represents a response message, such as "what is the size?", "what is the quantity?", "what is the color?", Or not responding, etc., this disclosure is not limited to this. Here, a training sample is represented as ( sk , _ak ,rk _, sk _{+1 )} , _where sk represents the state after _k messages, ak represents the action _taken at state _sk , and rk Represents the reward value after performing action a _k , and s _{k +1} represents the next state of performing action a _k . The reward value may be set as positive when the seller device accepts the order, and may be set as negative when the seller device decides to reject the order. If you are still unsure whether to accept the order and you need to ask for some information, the reward value can be calculated according to the following math.

a' in the above formula is a candidate action feature vector in the action set A, which is also represented as a response message. Q ( sk ₊₁ , a' ) represents the inner product between the state feature vector sk ₊₁ and the candidate action feature vector a' .

For each training sample, after the reward value is determined, the error (eg, the squared difference) between the reward value and the output value Q( s _k , _ak ) can be calculated, and the first training sample can be trained according to back propagation Neural network and second neural network. In this way, the above-mentioned reinforcement learning method can adaptively and automatically generate a response message according to the language used by the buyer's device, and ask questions such as "What is the size?" at an appropriate time, thereby assisting in completing the order.

After the server 110 collects the order information from the buyer's device, it can be presented to the seller's device 123 through the user interface 200 described above. In some embodiments, the server 110 may also provide some options in the user interface 200 to combine part of the order information. For example, the buyer device 173 has purchased different products in the community group 162 and the community group 163 at the same time, and the delivery address of these order information is the same. If the two orders are sent in two packages, the logistics will be increased. cost. Therefore the server 110 can to merge order information from different community groups that belong to the same buyer device. Order information from different management groups may also be combined in some embodiments. For example, the buyer device 172 has purchased different commodities in the community group 152 and the community group 161 at the same time, wherein the community group 152 and the community group 161 belong to different management groups 141 and 142 respectively, and the server 110 also The two order information can be combined. In some embodiments, order information for different buyer devices may also be combined. For example, the buyer device 171 and the buyer device 172 have purchased goods in the same community group 152, and the buyer device 171 and the buyer device 172 may be two families belonging to the same community or colleagues of the same company. Two buyers may want to combine orders to save on logistics costs. Therefore, the server 110 may provide an option to the seller device 123 to combine order information from different buyer devices 171,172.

In some embodiments, the server 110 may further establish a hierarchical group buying structure. As shown in FIG. 5 , the hierarchical group buying structure 500 includes a plurality of levels L1-L3, wherein the level L1 belongs to the highest level, and the level L3 is the lowest level . Each tier includes a seller device and multiple buyer devices, and the seller device sells goods to other buyer devices in the same tier. In particular, the buyer device can "group" to establish the next level, and at this time the buyer device is also the seller device of the next level. For example, the seller device 501 sells commodities to the buyer devices 511-513 and the seller device 502, and the seller device 502 also establishes its own level L2 and has its own buyer devices 514-515. Similarly, the seller device 503 is the buyer of the seller device 502, and also establishes its own level L3. That is, the seller The device 501 sells the commodity to the seller device 502 and other buyer devices 511~513, the seller device 502 resells the commodity to the seller device 503 and other buyer devices 514~515, and the seller device 503 resells the commodity to the buyer devices 516~517 . Through resale, the seller devices 502, 503 can earn the price difference of the commodity or share some profit. In such a hierarchical group buying structure 500, each level L1-L3 has its own logistics and cash flow to manage, but this may be inefficient. For example, the seller's device 501 must be shipped to the seller's device 502 before the seller's device 502 can Then, it is shipped to the seller's device 503, and finally the seller's device 503 can be shipped to the buyer's devices 516-517. Alternatively, the buyer devices 516 to 517 must first pay the seller device 503 , the seller device 503 then pays the seller device 502 , and finally the seller device 502 pays the seller device 501 . Therefore, in this embodiment, after constructing such a hierarchical group buying structure 500, the server 110 will collect the order information of all buyer devices in all levels L1-L3, and transmit the cash flow information and/or logistics information to the The seller device 501 of the highest level L1. In this way, all buyer devices can directly pay seller device 501, and seller device 501 can also be directly shipped to all buyer devices, which can save logistics and cash flow costs, procedures, and/or required time.

In some implementations, the product information link 310 including the image can be created by the seller device 501 of the highest level L1, and the server 110 can automatically transmit the product information link 310 to the seller devices 502, 503 of the lower level, and so on As a result, the seller devices 502 and 503 do not need to repeatedly create the product information link 310, thereby encouraging group formation.

FIG. 6 is a flowchart illustrating a group purchase order management method according to an embodiment. Referring to FIG. 6 , this method is executed by the server 110 . In step 601, a management platform is provided for a plurality of seller devices to establish a plurality of management groups, wherein each management group includes a plurality of community groups, and the plurality of buyer devices are respectively used to join the community groups according to the community accounts. In step 602, a purchase interface is provided, whereby the seller device publishes a product information link in the community group, and the buyer device opens the purchase interface through the product information link. In step 603, order information from buyer devices is received, order information from different community groups but belonging to the same buyer device is merged, order information from different management groups but belonging to the same buyer device is merged, and options are provided to the seller on the management platform Device to combine order information from different buyer devices. However, each step in FIG. 6 has been described in detail as above, and will not be repeated here. It should be noted that each step in FIG. 6 can be implemented as a plurality of codes or circuits, and the present invention is not limited thereto. In addition, the method of FIG. 6 may be used in conjunction with the above embodiments, or may be used alone. In other words, other steps may be added between the steps in FIG. 6 .

From another perspective, the present invention also proposes a computer program product, which can be written in any programming language and/or platform. When the computer program product is loaded into a computer system and executed, the above-mentioned product can be executed. Group purchase order management method.

In the above system and method, the seller can be assisted in merging order information to save logistics costs, it can also assist in establishing a hierarchical group buying structure to manage cash flow and logistics, and it can also use artificial intelligence to automatically generate dialogue to assist in completing orders.

Although the present invention has been disclosed above by the embodiments, it is not intended to limit the present invention. Anyone with ordinary knowledge in the technical field can make some changes and modifications without departing from the spirit and scope of the present invention. Therefore, The protection scope of the present invention shall be determined by the scope of the appended patent application.

110: Server

121~123: Seller's device

141~143: Management group

151~153, 161~163: Community groups

171~173: Buyer's installation

Claims (6)

A group purchase order management system, comprising: a server for providing a management platform; a plurality of seller devices for establishing a plurality of management groups through the management platform, wherein each of the management groups includes a plurality of community groups ; and a plurality of buyer devices respectively used to join one of the community groups according to a community account, wherein the seller devices are used to publish a commodity information in at least one of the community groups a link, the buyer devices open a purchase interface provided by the server through the commodity information link, and the buyer devices send an order information to the server through the purchase interface, wherein the server is used for combining different the order information of some community groups but belonging to the same buyer device, and the order information from different management groups but belonging to the same buyer device, wherein the server is also used to provide a option to the seller devices for merging the order information from different buyer devices, wherein the server is also used to establish a hierarchical group buying structure including a plurality of levels, each of the The layers include one of the seller devices and at least one of the buyer devices, wherein the server is used to collect the order information of all the buyer devices in the layers, and store the order information in the order information. The cash flow information or the logistics information is transmitted to the seller device of the highest level among the levels. The group purchase order management system of claim 1, wherein the server is used for linking the commodity information generated by the seller device at the highest level to the seller device at a lower level. The group purchase order management system of claim 1, wherein the server is further configured to add a virtual robot to one of the community groups, and the virtual robot has a plurality of messages about one of the buyer's devices Input to a first neural network to generate a state feature vector, input a plurality of messages corresponding to the seller's device into a second neural network to generate an action feature vector, calculate the state feature vector and the action feature The inner product of the vectors is used as an output value, the server is also used to determine a reward value according to whether the corresponding seller device accepts an order, calculate the error between the reward value and the output value, and according to the back propagation method to train the first neural network and the second neural network. The group purchase order management system according to claim 3, wherein when the corresponding seller device receives the order, the virtual robot sets the reward value to be positive, and when the corresponding seller device rejects the order, the virtual robot sets the reward The value is negative, otherwise the reward value is calculated according to the following math:

where A is an action set, a' is a candidate action feature vector in the action set, s _{k +1} is the next state feature vector, Q ( s _{k +1} , a' ) is the state feature vector s _{k +} The inner product between ₁ and the candidate action feature vector a' . A group purchase order management method is executed by a server, the group purchase order management method comprises: providing a management platform to a plurality of seller devices to establish a plurality of management groups, wherein each of the management groups includes a plurality of community groups, A plurality of buyer devices are respectively used to join one of the community groups according to a community account; a purchase interface is provided, whereby the seller devices publish a message in at least one of the community groups Commodity information link, the buyer devices open the purchase interface through the commodity information link; receive an order information from the buyer devices, and merge the order information from different community groups but belonging to the same buyer device , merging the order information from different management groups but belonging to the same buyer device, and providing an option to the seller devices in the management platform for merging the order information from different buyer devices; establishing a hierarchical group buying structure including a plurality of levels, each of the levels including one of the seller devices and at least one of the buyer devices; and collecting all the levels in the levels the order information of the buyer devices, and transmit the cash flow information or logistics information in the order information to the seller device of the highest level among the layers. A computer program product executed by a computer system to complete into multiple steps: providing a management platform to a plurality of seller devices to establish a plurality of management groups, wherein each of the management groups includes a plurality of community groups, wherein the plurality of buyer devices are respectively used to join according to a community account one of the community groups; providing a purchase interface, whereby the seller devices publish a product information link in at least one of the community groups, and the buyer devices are opened through the product information link the purchase interface; receiving an order information from the buyer devices, merging the order information from different community groups but belonging to the same buyer device, merging the order information from different management groups but belonging to the same the order information of the buyer device, and an option is provided to the seller devices in the management platform for merging the order information from different buyer devices; a hierarchical group buying structure is established, and the hierarchical group buying structure includes multiple layers, each of the layers includes one of the seller devices and at least one of the buyer devices; and collecting the order information of all the buyer devices in the layers, and placing the order The cash flow information or logistics information in the information is transmitted to the seller device at a highest level among the levels.

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