Abstract: A prescribed virtual person was created for allowing a real person (user) in the actual world to pretend to be the virtual person (virtual person) and act as the virtual person when acting on a network and registered in a database 12a of a financial institution 7 for enabling the user to make shopping or the like as the virtual person with an electronic certificate issued by the financial institution 7 for the virtual person when pretending to be the virtual person and acting on the network, and the address of the virtual person necessary as the destination of a purchased article was set to a nearby convenience store. When acting on the network as the virtual person, cookies are rendered easily acceptable as compared with the case of the real person.