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."

I don't understand...

How can you patent a payment method? This doesn't make any sense.

Re:I don't understand...

So, it's almost guaranteed that they will grant the patent. Because a room full of cocker spaniels could exercise better judgement than the US Patent Office.

Re:I don't understand...

It's not a payment method, it's a subscription for flat-rate shipping. I find it quite creative, and very useful for those who buy a lot more books than I do. That said, it's not an invention, and shouldn't be protected by patent law.

What we need is something like a short-term copyright/patent where a "minor innovation" is protected for a short period of time so that its creators can get some benefit from being the first to do it. 6-12 months would be sufficient for Amazon to establish this program as being "theirs" and make it obvious that anyone else who does it later is an imitator.

if you want to catch up you should start running

It's really getting time that the USPTO was gutted and brought up to standards with the rest of the world

All-You-Can-Eat Shipping?

Does anyone know if All-You-Can-Eat shipping means, All-You-Can-Eat shipping? After all, we wouldn't want this to occur, now would we?

-----------

Lionel Hutz: Now, Mrs. Simpson, tell the court in your own words what happened after you and your husband were ejected out of the restaurant.

Marge: Well, we pretty much went straight home.

Lionel Hutz: Mrs. Simpson, remember that you are under oath.

Marge: We drove around until three in the morning looking for another open all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant.

Lionel Hutz: And when you couldn't find one?

Marge: [crying] We... went... fishing.

Lionel Hutz: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do these sound like the actions of a man whose had ALL he could eat?

For pity's sake.

A clerk with the USPTO released the following response:

"OK, Amazon, I get it! You like patents. You like them a lot. Everywhere I turn in my crappy office, it's "Amazon!" "Amazon!" "AMAZON!" Well screw it, you can just have all the goddamn patents! Yes, all of them,! They're all yours! Just LEAVE ME ALOOOOONE!!!"

Said clerk followed up by darting into a shadowy corner of the file room, and crying for several hours.

Cool!

I'm off to patent shipping exactly three items in the same parcel.

Prime will kill them eventually.

I'm now on my second 'sample' of Prime. The first was given to my account, the second to my sibling's. In the course of those two, I have had such items as a 60-pound piece of exercise equipment shipped next-day to my home for $4 so it'd show up on my day off. I've ordered tons of books and had them shipped singly. And I have paid Amazon not a dime for the privilege, and wouldn't, ever.

Why? Because once upon a time, you could get free shipping and have something a few days later. Then, Super Saver started taking longer... and longer... and longer. They'd wait a week to ship an item that was 'ships within 24 hours'. I suppose this probably happened around the time that Prime was taking shape. But then, and this is the kicker, lots of items on the Amazon site started showing up as longer ship times than they'd had before. 'Ships within 3-5 days' or something like that for an item that used to be 24 hours. As someone who has a Prime membership, free or not, I found that irritating. But then the worst part:

They still often ship the items the next day. They just ship them by a method that will take longer to get there, even though you've used Prime for 'free second day shipping'. The excuse for this is that it 'still arrives within the delivery window', even though they're the ones who set the delivery window as being a week later for an in-stock product.

I'd rather they patented this, to be honest, because I don't want any other company copying it. I don't want to pay for the people who buy 'all you can ship' packages and then ship a huge piece of furniture on it, when all I'm usually shipping is small items. But I think that, patent or not, this will eventually either start costing a lot more or vanish entirely. The delays are a symptom of a system that doesn't work. They're having to cut corners now to afford Prime. They can't do that forever, because people won't pay for prime if *everything* starts taking a week to arrive with 'second day' shipping.

I don't want other companies doing this. I'm fine with paying for shipping if it's a reasonable price. Free is cool, too, because I know I'm still paying for it but it's packaged into the prices I'm paying, I don't have to add things to my cart to figure it out. I don't want to show up at other online sites where I shop to find that I suddenly have to shell out $80 to get things promptly because the 'free' shipping suddenly takes three times longer than it used to. It's not fair to the customers.

It actually changed my buying habits

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

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.

Low self-esteem or something. Very sad.

An acutely embarassing situation for their friends and relatives too, I would think, and if I were one of them I'd sue the USPTO for its part in facilitating this disgraceful and unnecessary exposure of these poor people to public ridicule. They need counselling or some other form of psychiatric help, not to have the symptoms of their illness recorded for posterity so that future generations can laugh and sneer at what they will no doubt see as seven lunatics or cretins who thought they were inventors.

so its a cash-flow scam, so what?

My (insanely) brief understanding is that this is merely a ploy to get more cash flow through amazon up front without expenses - pay a "fee" up front to get allegedly cheap(er) shipping later. works for the buyer if they buy enough (like paying $25 at B&N for 10% discounts later), works for amazon up front in that they get cash without immediate expense which can sit in an interest bearing account.

its really no different from any other "discount membership club" except the product you save on.

worthy of a patent? no. but this is the same PTO that patented a laser pointer as a cat toy, so fuck 'em.

oh wait, they patented that, too...

Mmm...peanuts

Am I the only one whose first thought on reading the headline was "edible packing material"?

I actually know someone who got a candy shipment as a gift, opened the box, and tried to eat those styrofoam packing peanuts.

All-You-Can-Eat Shipping?

Is this like a Godzilla reference?

      -dZ.

This is hardly novel...

Performance Bike [performancebike.com] has lower cost shipping and a 10% discount if you're a paid member, you can even sign up online. I can think of a half-dozen other sites I've seen that do the same.

This is stupid and Prime usually sucks

The idea that this is patentable is retarded.

That aside, Amazon Prime is ok except for one giant flaw, you can't search for items that are available via Prime. So if I want to grab, say an extension cable or something, I've got to wade through pages trying to find a seller that is eligable for Prime shipping.

Isn't this just "members get shipping free"?

This is just "free shipping for members" where the only perk of membership is free shipping. There's nothing at all novel about it. The patent is absurd. The idea of patenting a transaction is absurd. My only concern is that the PTO has shown the judgemet of a very small fungus, so they might actually allow this.

If this continues, the cooperation required for international IP treaties to work will collaspe. What must other countries think of the US?