Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Bert Speelpenning

Bassam A Saliba

Darren B Remington

D Chase Franklin

Eric George Jakstadt

Todd Alan Buiten

Michael Cockrill

Jeffrey L Keith

David G Heindel

An electronic billing system provides a set of tools for a biller to create and design a customized billing statement. The system includes a statement designer that enables the biller to create a template for the billing statement. Once the statement is designed, the biller provides the statement format and billing data to a third party billing service center, which generates the electronic billing statements in the biller-designed format and electronically distributes the billing statements to consumers. To assist the biller in creating statement templates, the biller integration system maintains industry schema tables that are tailored to particular industries. The tables provide a default set of predefined billing categories for a given industry that the biller might wish to use in its template. The biller integration system and service center are each equipped with a gateway to facilitate the exchange of the statement template and billing data. Each gateway has a parcel manager to reliably transfer parcels and track the parcels as they go from computer to computer. Through this parcel handling and monitoring system, the biller integration system keeps the biller informed as to the location and status of the statement templates, the billing data, any forthcoming payments, and so forth.

Distributed electronic billing system with gateway interfacing biller and service center

A system and method for conducting commerce over a distributed network manage merchant and product information in an electronic shopping basket, payment source information in an electronic wallet, and shipping address information in an electronic address book, all of such information being stored on a consumer computer. A commerce client running on the consumer computer is configured as a MIME handler and extends the functionality of a standard Web browser to support computer-based shopping. A merchant site Web server provides HTML-coded Web documents which describe merchant products and which host computer-based shopping options. The HTML-coded Web documents contain function-calling information by which consumer-selected options invoke shopping-related functions on either the merchant (server) computer or the consumer (client) computer. A consumer selects the options from within the Web browser to initiate shopping-related operations such as: retrieve product information from merchants on the World Wide Web, selectively store product information locally on the consumer computer, locally compare product information from different merchants, locally store payment source and shipping address information and selectively forward such information to merchant sites, order products from Web-based merchants, track the status of purchase orders, and receive instructional information on application usage.

System and method for conducting commerce over a distributed network

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Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Bert Speelpenning