Legal Geek No. 3 - Will Amazon Dominate with Anticipatory Shipping?

Welcome back to Legal Geek! The topic this week is whether Amazon's latest innovation in patenting a method for anticipatory shipping will dominate the retail market.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp03

Although Amazon's latest patent (US8615473) on a method and system for anticipatory shipping was issued right before Christmas, news outlets have really picked up on this in the last two weeks as the so-called latest innovation from the wildly successful online retailer. The patent claims a process of shipping products from distribution centers to more local hubs in accordance with business variables that are used to determine where those products are likely to be ordered by consumers.

Looking deeper into the description of the patent, these business variables can include everything from standard demand forecasting such as historical shipments and patterns to more sophisticated forecasting based on web page views and duration on pages, how long a cursor remains over product images, and shopping cart and wish list activity. These latter types of forecasting would be innovative, but it is unlikely that they will be used thanks to significant privacy concerns and the high accuracy of standard demand forecasting methods.

Thus, the patent really only covers a process that is highly similar to what larger retailers do while shipping bulk from overseas manufacturers to a first distribution center in the USA. Indeed, Amazon secured an earlier parent patent on a similar method of enterprise anticipatory shipping in December 2011 (US8086546), and the patent application is 10 years old!

So this is not exactly the freshest innovation from Amazon. But the concept of doing this on a consumer level could be the next logical step in dominating the retail competition. Anticipatory shipping, drone delivery, and employing the USPS on Sundays are the types of moves that keeps Amazon ahead of brick and mortal retailers as well as online competitors.

Bottom line: anticipatory shipping is not all that innovative and Amazon's patents on it will be nearly impossible to enforce against competitors, but the potential is there for incredible added innovation and efficiency. Now you'll have to excuse me because I'm almost out of toliet paper and I hear the drone dropping some off on my front porch. Convenient!

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