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.

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.

I think it's clever and creative. It's basically a free version of Newegg's preferential shipping scheme.

Just think that for every package that gets unfavorable treatment, there is a package that gets a better treatment. I bet you money service will improve overall.

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.

I'm pretty sure people would have forgotten about this had Amazon not seeked to patent it.

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.

There's nothing wrong with frequent customers getting better treatment, I fly a lot and enjoy my frequent flyer status which allows me into the airport lounges. I have no problem with amazon treating the frequent customers better but what I dislike is that I'm already being treated in a certain way by amazon and for pretty much no reason I'm going to be 'punished' and treated worse.

Now, as to why they thought that patenting it was a good idea, I don't have a clue.

That's really easy to answer. It's to stop someone else from patenting it and using it to sue them.

The whole thing is absurd, not just this particular patent, but this stupid torrent of all but worthless patents that is busily burying the US's future ability to innovate..

Guess it was pretty stupid of them to patent them and put themselves in the limelight for customer hostile practices, then, wasn't it? The good news for Amazon here is that people have amazingly short memories, but their timing might cost them a few bucks if this gets picked up on by someone like Walt Mossberg.

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.

It doesn't sound like they deliberately delay anything, just that good customers get to the top of the queue. I'm not at all surprised by this. If you sell widgets and have 2 emails in you inbox, one from a guy who orders a widget each Christmas, and one from that guy who buys about 36 a week, whose do you reply to first? They are just automating the system.

I'd guess amazons order scheduling system is very complex and balances a variety of elements, such as:

total order value
ease of scheduling that drop-off with others in the same area that day
customer loyalty
profit from the delivery 9is it paid delivery or a free delivery option)
etc.

Alright, lets run with your restaurant analogy. I know that if i were at a busy restaurant, and i was waiting 30mins for a table, and some regular showed up, and got seated before me, i would leave. What would you do?

Or perhaps that they'll ship orders faster to regular customers and the service to new/occasional customers will be exactly the same?

I used to really like Amazon's service, and still use them a lot, but find myself liking, and using, them less.

It started with free delivery on orders over a certain amount. Which is great since P&P used to negate the saving of buying CDs etc. online in the first place. Although free delivery orders didn't have a guaranteed time, they usually only a day or so slower than first class. But then the free option started taking longer to arrive, and now seems like they already deliberately delay sending out orders for a week or so just to guarantee the "up to 5" extra days.

The more amazon do this BS, the more often I go with another company rather than pay their premium for acceptable customer service. I used to just go with amazon for convenience even if they were a tiny bit more expense. Now they've made it a purely numerical decision.

I'll go along with your intent: I'd leave.

From the restaurant's perspective, that's fine. They'd rather turn away someone who may never have come back anyway than a regular who provides them consistent income.

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.

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.

I think you've missed their intent here. Such a system would almost definitely prioritize new accounts, because of their "future potential".

The sort of account that would likely be penalized under this system would probably be a guy who places an order once a year for exactly $25.01 to take advantage of the free shipping. Alternatively, they might frown upon customers who routinely RMA items, or issue chargebacks, which is also rather understandable.

I'm surprised this got patented. Every business on the planet practices this in some way or another, and you'd be daft to believe otherwise. If you're going to boycott Amazon, do it for the patent, and not for the idea.

That doesn't have to happen, and you need to take this from someone who has worked in an exclusively online bookstore.

When you give shipping expectation dates, you don't give the customer the earliest possible date - that leads to disaster when something goes wrong. You give them a reasonable expectation of when the package is going to be delivered which they can accept or not. That gives you time from order completion to dispatch to prioritise depending on the level of business each customer provides. As long as you don't exceed the expectations, then it works out fine.

I wouldn't be surprised (in fact, the opposite, I would be suprised if this wasn't the case) that Amazon have realised they have some extra time between order completion expected dispatch and want to fill that by improving service for their better customers.

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.

In any case, Amazon is doing it wrong.

My point was, most places will start with service level X and frequent customers might eventually get the better service level X+1.

What Amazon is doing is starting with service level X for everybody, and then going the other way. Frequent customers still get X, but infrequent customers get X-1.

The results are just about the same, but they've chosen a funny way of going about it. "Really good service for frequent customers is too expensive, so lets just provide even shittier service to infrequent customers and treat the frequent ones the same way."