The present invention provides a POS terminal that can prevent errors in registering product information relating to a product for sale from occurring when sales processing is performed. The POS terminal is for managing sales information of products at a store. A voice recognition dictionary (5) includes product names of products for sale registered therein. When a product name included in a voice uttered by an operator matches one of the product names registered in the voice recognition dictionary (5), a voice recognition unit (3) outputs the product name included in the voice as a voice-recognized product name. An operator display unit (10) displays product buttons for inputting the product names. When a product name of a product button pressed by the operator matches the product name voice-recognized by the voice recognition unit (3), product information of a product having the matched product name is registered.

A system and method to attribute expiration dates and quantities of a product to an SKU code for pricing purposes. This method applies dynamic pricing to perishable food items. Using bulk tagging capabilities, the supermarket can attribute expiration dates to items without the pain of actually tagging the items with stickers.

A product catalog service allows business entities to create and store product catalogs indicating products that are available from the business entities. A product catalog includes multiple product family definitions. Each product family definition specifies attribute names of a product family and, for each attribute name, a set of allowed attribute values. In order to specify a particular product variant, an entity may supply one of the allowed attribute values for each specified attribute name of the product. The product catalogs may be received from multiple business entities. Each product catalog may also be shared with multiple business entities. A merchant, for example, may select products from a product catalog to purchase from another merchant. When creating a product catalog, a business entity may reference product family definitions of other product catalogs.

A shopping support system includes processing circuitry having programmed instructions to determine if a commodity is collected for purchase by a purchaser at a sales floor of a store. The shopping support system determines if the commodity has been postponed for later collection based on an action of the purchaser on the commodity at the sales floor. Then, the shopping support system provides a notification in response to a determination that the commodity has been postponed for later collection and is not collected for purchase by the purchaser.

Aspects described herein may relate to techniques for segmenting one transaction into multiple sub-transactions. A user may wish to purchase multiple items. The overall purchase request may be segmented into multiple sub-transactions based on a transaction category of each item. Transaction categories may be based on merchant category codes (MCCs). Each sub-transaction may include one or more items related to the same transaction category. Each sub-transaction may be underwritten and approved separately by the merchant and/or a financial institution (e.g., a credit card company). Financial information related to each different transaction category may be determined based on the sub-transactions. Reward offers may be provided in a more robust manner based on the different transaction categories determined during the purchase process.

A protection system for tracking and securing the purchase and sale of a controlled substance. The system includes a network and a database that stores information of a plurality of customers. The information regarding each customer is stored in an individual account, and the database further stores the information regarding government regulations on purchase and sale of the controlled substance. Also, the system includes a plurality of end user terminals to record transactions of the controlled substance. There is a server in communication with the database and the end user terminals over the network. The server includes a compliance reporting system. The compliance reporting system executes instructions to compare, in real time, information about one customer and the transaction to information stored in the database regarding the government regulations and the customer. In one embodiment, the system prevents the purchase of the controlled substance based on the comparison.

A register system includes a first code scanner that includes a circuit configured to disable a security tag, a second code scanner that does not include the circuit, a data storage in which a product code is stored in association with a flag, for each product registered for sale, and a processor. The processor is configured to carry out purchase registration of a product based on a product code obtained through the second code scanner or cause a notification to be generated without carrying out the purchase registration of the product based on the product code obtained through the second code scanner, depending on a state of a flag associated with the obtained product code in the data storage.

In some arrangements, product packaging is digitally watermarked over most of its extent to facilitate high-throughput item identification at retail checkouts. Imagery captured by conventional or plenoptic cameras can be processed (e.g., by GPUs) to derive several different perspective-transformed views—further minimizing the need to manually reposition items for identification. Crinkles and other deformations in product packaging can be optically sensed, allowing such surfaces to be virtually flattened to aid identification. Piles of items can be 3D-modelled and virtually segmented into geometric primitives to aid identification, and to discover locations of obscured items. Other data (e.g., including data from sensors in aisles, shelves and carts, and gaze tracking for clues about visual saliency) can be used in assessing identification hypotheses about an item. Logos may be identified and used—or ignored—in product identification. A great variety of other features and arrangements are also detailed.

An apparatus 10, and system 70 may be embodied as an article 70 or method implementing transactions between a central or “core” application 72, a fulfillment application 96 at a venue, and a wireless communication application 84, 86 hosted on a computing device 10, such as a cell phone, of an attendee at an event at that venue. Customers may sign up online, through various types of web applications 88 or dedicated applications 92, to receive information, such as menus, catalogs, or the like of available products to be at the event. The core application 72 may manage a database 74 of records of customers, products, and fulfilment locations, and may send to fulfilment locations instructions to dispatch “runners” to deliver products to seat locations of customers ordering through wireless computer devices 12 at a venue.

Disclosed are various embodiments for managing reportings of item listings for items that are available through an electronic commerce system. A reporting for the item listing is obtained from a merchant, and evaluations of the reporting are obtained from other merchants. A net evaluation of the reporting is generated, and it is determined whether to initiate a correction event based at least in part on the net evaluation of the reporting.