I’m an entrepreneurial twenty three year old, part of the team at we are social, a conversation agency based in London.
On this site, I blog mainly about communication, design, technology and the arts, and their impact on society. I also write the Skype blog.
I have to confess to being a bit of an Amazon Prime addict — whatever the magic is, it makes impulse shopping disturbingly easy.
It occurred to me recently that Amazon (in the UK at least) must be able to distinguish between residential and business addresses, and that this is reflected in their delivery service choice. If I order something to my home address, it’s delivered with no signature requirement. On the other hand, if it comes to the office, I have to sign for it.
This is entirely sensible — after all, there’s nothing more annoying than having to go to the delivery office to sign for something not hugely valuable, and they’ve obviously decided that most of their customers work during the day, and therefore aren’t going to be around to accept deliveries at home.
Of course, it’d be nice if I could give them a URL of an anonymised calendar so that they could pick their delivery times and modes à la feeds-based VRM — on the days when I work from home, I’d be happy to accept packages, for example. Better still, they could aggregate my calendar with those of my housemates to optimise things further.
It’ll be interesting to see whether UK retailers make any headway in this space over the next few years. I put my money on a company like Ocado getting there first — Amazon are too busy working out how to sell you more stuff.
Amazon, Ocado, retail, shopping, UK, VRM
I’m an entrepreneurial twenty three year old, part of the team at we are social, a conversation agency based in London.
On this site, I blog mainly about communication, design, technology and the arts, and their impact on society. I also write the Skype blog.