Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Patents Bad Service For Bad Customers
mikesd81 writes "Techdirt reports that Amazon has been awarded a patent for Generating Current Order Fulfillment Plans Based on Expected Future Orders. Essentially, if Amazon deems that you won't be a long time customer or ordering again soon, your order will take longer to be expedited."
As I said when this was posted on Techdirt, this system could encourage customers not to shop at amazon, because when you start shopping there the shipping takes longer. Appeasing a small group of users who make up the majority of purchases and irritating a larger group who make only occasional purchases is not the way to go.
Everything is subjective.
Self-fulfilling prophecy much? It works both ways, guys--if you slow my order because you don't think I will be a good customer, guess what, you can be pretty sure I won't.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
This is not only a dumb thing to patent, but also something that is a dumb idea in general.
A) How are you going to prove that another company delayed an order for that reason? How would you be able to prove anything in a court of law, so your patent wouldn't be infringed on?
B) Why, oh why, would anyone use this idea? Delaying the orders of non-longtime customers or customers that are not extremely active is the wrong way to do things. First impressions count, and one of the reasons that I am such a Newegg fanatic is because my first order came overnight via UPS ground, extremely well packaged to boot.
If Amazon implements something like this, I'm not going to shop there out of principle.
Why is this different than any other enterprise? Bigger customers generally get preferential treatment. If two customers call me and have network issues, and I have billed one of them $50,000 in the past year, while the other one bought one compact flash card from me two years ago, which one am I going to take care of first?
Now, as to why they thought that patenting it was a good idea, I don't have a clue.
Amazon wishes to patent this as a form of obstructive competition. (Which seems to be the only use for software and process patents). If they hold a monopoly, nobody else in the commercial optimization space can offer software or business process design that includes this particular expression of Pareto optimization without fear of Amazon's lawyers. It is ugly, but because our government rewards this sort of behavior, it would be against the shareholder's best interests NOT to pursue such patents. Now, if the consuming public provide a massive negative reaction to this behavior, then the shareholders would be rightfully demanding that Amazon and other companies not play the patent game. But we all know how thoughtful most consumers are.
Anybody who actually read that patent (obligatory of course not, this is slashdot) can see that the article has it totally wrong. First of all, Amazon -would- be stupid to patent what the article claims. It would be very bad for business, and whatever you may think of Amazon, they are extremely good at business. This patent describes a system for determining how to fulfill an order (not just in terms of when to ship, but also, where to ship from, how to ship, etc) based on a multitude of factors. These factors include future orders, but those future orders refer to the expectation of future orders for all customers. Statistics 101 (Amazon surely knows this): the future orders of one specific customer are very hard to model, but the future orders of all customers are pretty easy to model. The point is to optimize the fulfillment process for all customers. Yes, it -could- be possible for them to use these techniques to target specific customers, but I would think it much more likely that they would use this in the favor of new customers they are trying to hook, rather than older established customers. Netflix, anyone?
How can anybody here think they deserve to waste space by posting an opinion on something they haven't even taken the time to check out?
Actually, this is just business common sense. It's common sense to take the best care of your best customers. It's also common sense that this sometimes means poorer service for your less preferred customers. Since good customers are profitable and bad customers are unprofitable, if you can shift more of your business towards your good customers you make more money. If Amazon does this right, it doesn't matter to them that you get pissed off at them and never do business with them; if that happens its because they aren't making money taking care of your needs.
There are customers you don't want to have as customers. Only the best and the worst outfits treat every customer as indispensable: the worst because they have trouble attracting and retaining any customers at all, the best because they've already shed the unprofitable customers. Small businesses in particular are often burdened with unprofitable customers because of the ego of the proprietors. Retaining or rejecting a customer becomes an emotional decision rather than a calculated one.
As stated in the title, this is just another common sense and non-patentable business idea, like bringing in more income than putting out expenses: easier to say than to do. What might be patentable as a business method patent is a specific scheme for prioritizing your good customers. I'm not for business method patents, because they don't really advance the state of the art of doing business. Yet if business method patents are allowed, this is precisely the sort of thing they're supposed to protect, specific mechanisms for achieving business goals.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'd be curious to learn why you were modded funny rather than insightful or interesting.
The reality is that this is a good thing for consumers if the patent makes it through its paces. As consumers we would all know that Amazon provides bad service on purpose, and other retailers would have to pay in order to provide deliberately bad service.
Seems like a win-win to me.
Sigh.
EVERYONE has different preferences for shipping times. For some stuff, I want it right away, or for a specific gift, I might want it to arrive on or before a date certain. For other things (like used books for 10 dollars, just as an example), I could care less if it is a few days late.
Did you not read the major takeaway from that comment, which is that there are limited shipping resources and we can only devote so many at any given time? Even in the long run, it doesn't make sense to allocate infinite shipping resources.
What we are saying is this: If you can't get EVERYONE's package on time, doesn't it make sense to figure out who will actually care and matter in the long run and get their on time. If you had to choose which on to prioritize, which one would you get on time?
And to your direct question, yes. It pays to be the squeaky wheel.