Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
Amazon wants to do this on a more micro, person-by-person level. For example, you visit a product page for some specialty shampoo. Amazon might decide to ship that product before you even add it to your cart.
You can't just boil a patent down to two words and then claim prior art.
Hard to believe that Amazon is going to move the needle much with something like this. Shipping is already fast. Getting it where it needs to be is obvious. As you have noted there are many examples of manufacturers anticipating demand and doing something similar. But they don't have or file for patents. What about a patent for anticipating that your chain restaurant will need less help on certain days of the year or when it rains? Most business would not waste time on this thing (patents) although they do these things if they can. They don't crow about it though (unless they are doing a dog and pony show).
This is the type of thing that most companies would do in many cases and never talk about. Because they aren't as obsessed with creating an image of invincibility which Amazon spends so much time with. [1] It's kind of like the shock and awe of US Military propaganda (where they show the well oiled military machine.) People eat this type of thing up. "Oh look how special Amazon is".
[1] To scare off competition. Look how mighty we are. Look at the barriers to competing with us!
It's fairly clear Amazon sees that as a key source of future growth.
Edit: Before anyone mentions it, don't buy those bass traps. They're not big enough to do the job for low frequencies. For that you need a pallet of rockwool and a weekend carpentry project ;-)
They keep everything on shelves at the local fulfillment center. I go there maybe once every two weeks and pickup my stuff.
It's a pretty neat concept called retail.
Amazon specializes in providing the long tail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail) to customers; Walmart is the utter opposite. By aggregating predictive data about the cumulative micro-consumption habits of users, shipping times could be lowered for the products inside the long tail.
This is traditional stock management, pure and simple.
"To minimize [the cost of returns], Amazon said it might consider giving customers discounts" -- just like any other overstocked store.
If I need a linear carriage, a Razer Hydra, an obscure philosophy text by Merleau-Ponty, a 1/8" straight fluted HSS router bit, a jar of Mexican mole sauce, and a monitor arm mount -- where do I go? Walmart? My neighborhood mom-and-pop store? Of course not.
The difference is that this is a way to get stuff to your door within a few hours of your placing an order, instead of you going somewhere very 2 weeks.
That's the whole point. Amazon is trying to do this at a lower cost.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/business/wal-mart-tests-sa...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/28/us-retail-walmart-...
So states such as Virginia have cut deals with Amazon to collect tax from them. Congress is talking about making it easier for other states to do the same. The era of the tax-free internet is nearing an end.
I am picturing it more like turning the UPS and Fedex pipelines into short-term storage.
The shipping & distribution equivalent of delay line memory
They should come up with a way of tracking what pictures people look at and then shipping the stuff in the pictures to the warehouses near those people. I bet you could do the picture tracking thing with an ActiveX control. That wouldn't work in Navigator, of course.
It seems more realistic to transmit the pictures using CD-ROM technology: it's like Netflix, but for CD-ROMs. Amazon would mail you their catalog CD-ROM, and you look at a slideshow of all the products they sell. Then, when you decide what you want, simply fax your order to Amazon, and they tell you which "shop" to drive to in order to pickup your merchandise.
Actually that is pretty sweet idea.
They should go back to the drone delivery plans, they were more thoroughly thought out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research#History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_chain_management
I guess they just patented a particular way of doing this.
I'm heavily opposed to winner-take-all and so my boycott of Amazon books must continue. I don't really buy anything other than physical books off of Amazon, so it's not a huge sacrifice.
Or you borrow it from him for a week for $19, he'll also lend you his blender for another $19.
Of course, this would probably make shipping to me a lot cheaper.
But what if it was on your doorstep at 5PM when you get home, and it didn't cost you a dime extra?
It's also pretty clear why Amazon would love this; they could give you Prime 2-day delivery times with Super-Saver 2-week postage rates.
Though I suspect Amazon isn't filing this patent as a means to control the concept (isn't it even that revolutionary that it needs protecting?).
Totally obvious.
More like "Joe Bob in Nowhereville, KY has this item in his wishlist. He looked at it three times in the past three days, and twice today. The last time he exhibited this pattern he bought it within two days, as have 78% of the people in this geographical region who have exhibited similar patterns. Let's ship to a local transit in prep for his order."
Actually really cool - and at least based on the summary (can't view the linked doc b/c of missing plugin of some kind) it's a business method patent as opposed to a software patent.
In order to best anticipate demand, they should be trying to make deals with manufactures instead. This system would initially work best with subscription based products. And then we could figure out how to turn everything into a type of subscription.
Manufactures have a release cycle that is important to them staying 'competitive'. So they have to constantly make new models and 'retire' the old ones by planned obsolescence forcing us to buy the new slightly improved model that has a time bomb built in it to go off when the next model comes out.
So basically Amazon needs to place their customers in a 'release preference' category. With names like, 'bleeding-edge','beta','stable','2 generations back', or 'annually/biannually'. This could make manufactures more responsible and get the latest designs out of secret labs and into consumers hands quicker.
Customers can choose which category they want to be included in for different product families. So for example, I might choose the 'bleeding-edge' release cycle for my phone, but prefer a biannual subscription for a refrigerator or car.
And unless someone has a brand preference, the best products can be automatically chosen based on reviews from amazon and social networks and blogs and benchmarks on hardware/battery life/speed/etc
Discounts will be given for recycling your previous models, and as our 3d printing becomes better and closer to home, eventually we might just get 'ink' credits to print out phones, computers, cars, furniture, TV's etc.
On a side note, this kind of system would be the system of all systems and it would be hard for competitors to start (without the data owned by Amazon). So I don't think 'Amazon' should get to boast and claim this system as their own and keep the profits. I would like to see this type of system organized at the national level at first (until we fully embrace globalization) and we could vote on an open source 'shopping and distribution' system whose profits go back directly to the people in the countries they operate. Then people could join and accept a national system to be proud of, one whose contributors, ideas,transactions,money,etc are all open and viewable by anyone to encourage accountability.
Wrong. The patent exemplifies a growing trend among technology and consumer firms to think their business processes ought to be protected by patents when in fact, no such need exists. Certainly there is no wider (public, society, industry) good from allowing rich companies to patent something many others may have easily figured out independently.
Or even other people who just have 1 single patent for something they want to do.
So don't blame the companies, they are acting rationally; blame the system.
The fact is, voters have set up a dog-eat-dog system. Now you complain because the dogs eat or get eaten.
A method and system for anticipatory package shipping are disclosed. According to one embodiment, a method may include packaging one or more items as a package for eventual shipment to a delivery address, selecting a destination geographical area to which to ship the package, shipping the package to the destination geographical area without completely specifying the delivery address at time of shipment, and while the package is in transit, completely specifying the delivery address for the package.
As long as you consider being at the store "in transit" they've effectively "invented" physical stores with a digital only interface. The patent even describes a method of giving customers in the region discounts on products that don't sell and are sitting in the "store".
There is nothing novel or new about this and the patent system is broken for more than just software. The entire rest of the patent is a bunch of filler to make it seem like there's something important going on when there in fact is not.
Here's an idea. Pre-ship merchandise to local independent retail locations, waive the shipping fee but let the retailer mark it up a bit, and offer in-store pickup.
It's a proven business model, since that's how people bought stuff before catalogs and the internet.
Patents Office got fooled into seeing this as an invention. The violation could happen only if they could predict what I specifically want to buy and ship it for me specifically. If all they do is optimise distribution, well that's happening since the dawn of trade may I guess.
Something about seeing a big red box next to the analyst highlighting their company's negative stock performance makes me a wee bit less confident in their analysis.
For example, the 7th Harry Potter book, especially if you ordered previous books with Amazon.
Or some videogame series, or something similar. Still, for these there's a "pre-order" period, so preshiping without a preorder is kind of moot
http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/england/consumer_e/consumer_co...
Edit: In the US it looks like it's illegal to send you something you didn't order unless it's a sample or from a charity.
https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/investigations/MailFraud/...
If I keep getting boxes on my doorstep that I didn't order, I don't think Amazon should expect me to keep sending them back.
I'm not turning my front porch into an Amazon micro-warehouse.
It's probably cheaper & more time-efficient for Amazon to write off the cost of the item than to deal with reshipping & restocking an item that can't be sold as new anymore.