
Amazon plans to ship your packages before you even buy them - sillysaurus3
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/18/5320636/amazon-plans-to-ship-your-packages-before-you-even-buy-them
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sillysaurus3
I submitted this mainly to find out whether it's real. It's quite interesting
if true, but the whole "preempatively ship packages to customers' addresses"
reminds me of
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA_gwzx39LQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA_gwzx39LQ)

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clinton_sf
The journalist spin on this is misleading, especially the part about
"speculatively shipped to a physical address".

It's common in supply chain management to optimize the ordering and placement
of items before they are "consumed". If you store everything in one central
location, there's an increased cost to quickly move it to the final
destination. If you distribute some items to regional hubs, there's a (wasted)
cost to doing that too, especially if you ship more or less than is actually
needed. They try to estimate what items go where based on their historical
data: what people buy where and how often. They could speculatively do this
with "people who buy this will often buy that" data too.

In this case, they look at the cost of returning an excess item from a
regional hub to an upstream distribution center and try to recoup the cost by
selling to someone near it's current location at a discount that is less than
the cost of moving it around further.

