Links 🔗

Amazon's Patent Application Publication

I don't know about you but my experience of picking up stuff from stores has always been a disaster. It's either I go to the store and they only start working on my order or people don't pick up their orders and cause a backlog that confuses the staff. Despite having the technology, customers and store associates still spend an unnecessary amount of time waiting. 

Apparently, Amazon also recognizes this problem and hopes to solve it by filing this patent. But wait, isn't Amazon a delivery company? Now that's the interesting part.

This patent application allows Amazon to predict accurate pick-up times for customers who want to pick up online deliveries from a store

How It Works 📜

• A geographical fence is established around a store 
  
• When a customer enters a geofence, a notification will be triggered that lets the store know that the customer is on their way
• Using GPS data, a customer's ETA may be predicted. This will then trigger a notification for the store associate to start collecting items to fulfil the orders
• Multiple geofences may also be established around the store and each of them may be associated with respective action
• For example, when a customer enters the first geofence, store associates can first collect non-perishable goods like cereal and canned foods. Then when the customer enters the second geofence, the store associates can then begin to collect perishable goods like meat and ice-cream

Why This Is Interesting 🔮

• Remember four years ago, in 2017 when Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in cash? 
• Well, Amazon quickly realised that Whole Foods' store network wasn't exactly robust enough to provide adequate geographic coverage to satisfy the exploding grocery e-commerce demand. On top of that, Whole Foods' customer profile wasn't exactly what Amazon had expected
• That's why upon frustration, in 2020, Amazon rolled out Amazon Fresh at places that made more sense to them
• My guess is that Amazon is trying to integrate their online platform with their physical retail stores by enabling customers to order their groceries online and then collect them from their closest Amazon Fresh store without waiting 
• This filing is most probably Amazon’s attempt at making the process of picking up items as efficiently as possible, both for the customer and for the store

Before you go...

• Check out issue #34 where we talked about Disney's NFT Patent 🌌
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