Patent attributes
Techniques are described for determining merchants that are able to provide items of interest. In some situations, consumers or other users supply requests for information about particular items of interest, and appropriate local merchants that are currently available to provide those items are identified and indicated to the users who made the requests. The identification of such appropriate local merchants may include automatically contacting human representatives of potentially appropriate merchants in order to automatically solicit information about the merchant, such as quantity and pricing information for items currently available in local inventory and current operating hours. The described techniques may be performed in an automated manner by an item availability information system, such as to provide a corresponding item availability information service to users (e.g., in exchange for fees from users).
