Items tagged with anticipatory-shipping
The latest milestone in Amazon’s quest to get products to your door faster is going to involve trucks that can print items on the way to your house. Amazon filed a patent this week with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that envisions delivery trucks bearing 3D printers, rather than boxes. The patent lays out a fairly simple plan. A customer places an order, which is directed to a local Amazon truck. “A manufacturing apparatus can be selected to manufacture the item based on the 3D manufacturing instructions,” the patent abstract reads. At that point, the truck heads to your house with your 3D-printed components in tow. The potential for such an operation...
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Amazon never stops looking for ways to get packages to people in as little time as possible, and its latest effort on that front is shipping packages before you even order an item. Amazon is calling it “anticipatory shipping”, and the company just landed a patent for it. Simply put, Amazon will pack up items before anything is ordered, ship them to a general geographic region, and not specify the exact address until it’s already in transit. We can see this being a smart, relatively low-tech way to get deliver packages faster. Certainly there are many regular orders from customers that Amazon deals with every day, and further, it can’t be that hard to maintain a database...
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