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Amazon Patents Bad Service For Bad Customers

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-not-quite-but-still dept.

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."

6 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. In other words ... by Aetuneo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  2. Great idea... not. by Coopjust · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. The patent is the only thing by canUbeleiveIT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Pareto Optimization by gregor-e · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It's a form of Pareto optimization, in which a reallocation of resources is expected to improve the utility for a subgroup without decreasing the utility of others. In this case, users who are not regular Amazon consumers will not have pre-set expectations of service. So fulfilling their orders in a slightly less rushed fashion will not be noticeable to them. By applying the resources freed from servicing new customers to improved service of old customers, the old customers will sense that Amazon just keeps getting better and better for them, further cementing their loyalty.


    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.

  5. Read, you lemmings! by eaglej · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  6. Re:Waitaminute by hedwards · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.