Amazon Wants Patent for All-You-Can-Eat Shipping

theodp writes "USPTO documents released Thursday show that Amazon is seeking a patent covering subscription-based shipping, aka Amazon Prime. Among the seven listed inventors is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has been singing the praises of Amazon Prime to Wall Street."

Comments

It actually changed my buying habits

[dleewo]

I've paid for the Prime service and I actually love it. When I added up my shipping costs for stuff Ihad ordered in year before getting Prime, it was more that the prime fee.

Now that I have it, I don't even bother to try and combine orders. I just order when I want. Last week, I bought 2 ink cartridges for my ink jet for about $6 each. I ordered one in the morning and the other in the evening.

What Prime does though (and obviously the reason Amazon offers the service) is that when I want to order anything online, I always check Amazon first and in 95% of the cases, I order it from them.

Re:It actually changed my buying habits

[Overzeetop]

Sorry I don't have mod points, but this is exactly the value to Amazon.

I do the same thing, and usually weigh the increased amazon cost against the pay-for-shipping, but cheaper unit-price vendor. It works, imo, because nobody else does it. If everybody had the option - say a Buy.com Prime membership - it would lose its value. I'm not going to pay three or four vendors $70/yr - it's only be aggragating a large percentage of my purchases in one place that makes it worthwhile. (I'm not sure there's a resonable logic in there, to be quite honest). Also, $3.99 for an overnight shipment of a reference book I really need or a gift I've forgotten to buy/send is a bargain compared to the usual shipping rates.