A world wide supermarket scheme using rights trading system

This paper presents a new electronic commerce scheme that provides consumers with a one stop check-out service for the purchase of a set of items from multiple autonomous shops. In this scheme, a consumer collects a transaction ticket, a specific form of digital-right, from each shop for each purchase representing the right to said purchase, and transfers the collected tickets to a check-out agent when the customer finally decides to complete all purchases selected. This approach allows for the autonomy of inventory/reservation databases in each shop without requiring them to provide transaction control interfaces, e.g., prepare, commit, and rollback, which are traditionally required to avoid the situation in which an item put into a shopping cart does not exist at the check-out phase. It also enables the redemption of digital coupons or gift certificates together with transaction tickets at the same time in a uniform manner