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Abstract

An electronic payment system in which a buyer purchases a product by sending an electronic payment order to a seller is enhanced to provide product survey information. An additional entity, an evaluator, collects product survey information from buyers that have previously purchased products from the seller and provides product survey information to prospective buyers upon request. Various schemes are disclosed for allowing the evaluator to verify that a buyer providing product survey information has actually purchased the product from the seller. In one verification scheme, the buyer generates an authentication code as a one-way function of a randomly generated secret value and includes the authentication code in the payment order. When the buyer later provides survey information to the evaluator, it includes the secret value along with the survey information. The evaluator verifies the purchase transaction by presenting the secret value along with information identifying the transaction to the buyer's billing system. The buyer's billing system retrieves the authentication code from the transaction information it received from the seller and compares it with the code regenerated from the secret value using the one-way function. The buyer's billing system communicates the comparison results to the evaluator, which uses the survey information if it is verified as relating to an actual transaction between the buyer and the seller. In another verification scheme, the evaluator presents only transaction-identifying information to the buyer's billing system. In yet another verification scheme, the seller signs the payment order and returns the signed payment order as a proof of purchase to the buyer, which presents the proof of purchase to the evaluator.

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First Claim