Predictive shipping from Amazon fails to impress UK consumers

Wednesday, April 2, 2014 - 12:19 by Mike Price

Last month it emerged that Amazon was trialling a new concept for delivery, which would mean that products are shipped out in anticipation of an order being placed online.

Crucially this would occur without the order actually being made, with Amazon planning to predict what people will want and when they will want it. The online retail giant has even patented the concept, according to The Drum.

But the results of a study conducted by YouGov, suggest that people in the UK are less than happy with this predictive approach to product deliveries, with 55 per cent of those questioned saying that they would be vexed if Amazon did adopt this tactic.

Over 2,000 people took part in the study and 37 per cent revealed that they would feel like their privacy had been invaded if items were being delivered, even if they had not carried out a transaction through safe shopping online.

The same proportion of respondents said that they would not choose to keep any items pre-emptively delivered to their homes via this method on principal, thus sending a message to retailers that this was not something they found useful.

E-commerce companies are clearly in need of a solution which allows them to get online orders to people as quickly and efficiently as possible, with anticipatory shipping from Amazon being just one technology under consideration at the moment.

High street chains with an online presence have the advantage in this scenario, because of course, it means that click & collect can be harnessed for same-day access to web orders. While Amazon may not find many fans of its new approach to deliveries in the UK, it has plenty of other plans up its sleeve that could be a hit with consumers.