Predictive Shipping or Predictable Slip-up?

A couple of weeks ago , the tech headlines were buzzing with news about the next evolution in online shopping, with  Amazon announcing the latest ace that it’s busily been stuffing up its sleeve; the patent for ‘predictive shopping’. As the name suggests, the idea is to use a range of customer information and data to foresee when a customer is likely to make a purchase and start the shipping process before they’ve actually bought it.

Of course, in theory that sounds great; if they can cut down delivery waiting times for shoppers then it’s all to the good. But then again, there could be some fairly deep pitfalls there too, with the potential to create some PR howlers, which could ultimately snowball into a far less amusing media crisis.

Firstly, there’s the obvious issue of customers receiving things they didn’t want. Amazon’s current system for recommendations on other items you might like often seem a little limited to items that are directly related to previous purchases. For example, I’ve often noticed that after purchasing a book, my recommendations are just flooded with other works by the same author – hardly delving into my inner psyche and subconscious buying preferences!

I’d hope ‘predictive shopping’ is a little more sophisticated, but I can still see this backfiring and creating plenty of hassle for people who have to return items sent to them in error. If that does start to happen, there could be some major headaches for the PR machine behind Amazon, with some pretty embarrassing headlines potentially emerging. Depending on the scale of the errors (and if there are any embarrassing or less than savoury items being mailed out to unwitting recipients), then this really could become a full blown media crisis.

Again, my inner PR is thinking of the headlines. How about if copies of the latest Grand Theft Auto game start shipping automatically to every address occupied by a teenaged boy? As I said, I know that one’s unlikely, but still, I know of one paper in particular that would have a field day with that.

Ultimately, for someone who works in technology PR, I’m a bit of a technophobe at heart (my smart-phone is about 3 years old now, and I resolutely refuse to swap books for e-books). As a result, it’s perhaps not all that surprising that I’m a little cynical about the idea of ‘predictive shopping’ (so don’t take it personally Amazon.) On a professional level though, I will be very interested to see how the system pans out, and if Amazon has predicted any potentially negative PR fallout.