The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted a patent to Amazon that can be used to prevent shoppers at Amazon's offline outlets from accessing online price comparison platforms, reports The Verge. This is ironical, to say the least, because Amazon's growth has been fueled by the fact that it allowed shoppers to compare prices online before making a decision regarding where they would buy from. The patent, which is titled 'Physical store online shopping control', is a mechanism that will allow the retailer to intercept network requests such as URLs or search terms over the in-store Wi-Fi, and then take action based on it. So, for example, if the retailer notices that a shopper is trying to access a competitor's website, they could potentially block it, redirect to a different URL, or even snoop and offer the shopper a better price. A system, comprising: at least one wireless access point configured to provide Internet access to a consumer device within a retail establishment associated with a retailer, and at least one processing component configured to: identify a first uniform resource locater (URL) requested, via the wireless access point, by a browser application executing on the consumer device; determine, based upon a comparison of the first URL to stored information associated with one or more competitors of the retailer, that the first URL is associated with a competitor Web site; identify an offering of an item on the competitor Web site; identify (i) retailer information associated with an…
