Sachin=GOD Posted January 23, 2014 Posted January 23, 2014 Amazon Wants to Send You Stuff Before You’ve Even Decided to Buy It E-commerce juggernaut Amazon has a long legacy of fielding eyebrow-raising ideas — it recently told 60 Minutes it was experimenting with delivery by drone and, heck, even the Kindle e-reader was out-there at one point. Now the Seattle-based giant has patented a method of shipping products before customers even place an order. In December, Amazon was granted U.S. Patent No. 8,615,473 B2 for what the company describes as “anticipatory shipping,†or a way of initiating the delivery process before a customer even clicks buy. The idea is to cut down delivery time and, possibly, make it even less necessary to visit brick-and-mortar stores. The document describes a process for boxing and shipping items the company expects customers in a specific area will want — based on previous orders, product searches, wish lists or the contents of a shopping cart before checkout. Once in transit, the packages would theoretically wait at the shippers’ hubs or on trucks until an order arrives. That is different from the current approach: today, the site receives an order and then labels packages with the final-destination addresses at its warehouses before loading them onto delivery trucks. Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester Research analyst, told the Wall Street Journal: “It appears Amazon is taking advantage of their copious data. Based on all the things they know about their customers they could predict demand based on a variety of factors.†http://business.time.com/2014/01/18/amazon-wants-to-send-you-stuff-before-youve-even-decided-to-buy-it/ Another detailed link - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/01/17/amazon-wants-to-ship-your-package-before-you-buy-it/ Wouldn't this end up being more costly for Amazon as packaged products will have to wait in shippers' hubs or trucks for order confirmation which, in many cases, may not even come or may come later than anticipated....
Holysmoke Posted January 25, 2014 Posted January 25, 2014 These guys have some MAD algorithms. I'd say they know wtf they are doing.
hhunaeh Posted January 25, 2014 Posted January 25, 2014 Amazon Wants to Send You Stuff Before You’ve Even Decided to Buy It http://business.time.com/2014/01/18/amazon-wants-to-send-you-stuff-before-youve-even-decided-to-buy-it/ Another detailed link - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/01/17/amazon-wants-to-ship-your-package-before-you-buy-it/ Wouldn't this end up being more costly for Amazon as packaged products will have to wait in shippers' hubs or trucks for order confirmation which, in many cases, may not even come or may come later than anticipated.... They very likely have smaller closer local hubs, larger farther main hubs,huge and costly transportation capability between the hubs. If they can predict better, which they can these days with all the big data collection and analysis, they can save on the transportation costs while moving ordered products from main hub to your home(by moving a lot of predicted stuff along with the ordered stuff to the local hub between the main hub and your home) and charge more on future instant deliveries(of predicted stuff already in the local hub). This has to make up for wrong prediction costs(the cases you are talking about). With better analysis and suggestions they can make their prediction better.
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