Amazon.com on Thursday announced that customers looking to get their packages sooner will have a couple new options available to them.
Amazon customers placing deliveries within the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Seattle, as well as "some surrounding areas," will now be able to receive shipments on the same day they place an order. The service will be coming to Chicago, Indianapolis, and Phoenix "in the coming months."
Amazon said "thousands of items" are available now to customers living in those cities. The new option, called Local Express Delivery, will have varied pricing that depends on the type of product purchased. Amazon Prime members--customers who pay $79 per year to receive unlimited two-day shipping from the online retailer--will need to pay $5.99 per item for the service.
In order to get an item on the same day it's ordered, customers will need to buy products prior to their city's cutoff time. For example, New York customers will need to order a product by 10 a.m. ET, while Seattle customers can purchase products by 1 p.m. PT. The other cities' cutoff times vary within that range. According to Amazon, it will list the cutoff times on each eligible product's detail page.
Amazon's Local Express Delivery charges.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
When questionable economics makes for good business.
Years ago, for my wife's birthday, I bought her a terrarium for her orchids. You know where I got it? Terrariumsale.com. Because that's what showed up in Google. Now, Terrariumsale.com is not a business unto itself. It's one of several front-ends to a catalog of goods sold by FineWebStores. I was reminded of this today when I got a pitch for FreeShippingOn.com, a site that helps you find items available for sale online that you can get without paying shipping fees. I wrote back to the person who sent me the pitch: "You're kidding. That's a whole business?" It's not, of course. But it's a great strategy.
The idea of shopping by shipping cost is dumb. (Better bet: use a shopping service like NexTag that computes total price for you including tax and shipping.) But that's not for me to judge. If people want to buy items based on shipping cost, and FreeShippingOn can get those eyeballs and those affiliate dollars, more power to the person who launched the service.
And that person is Jonathan Lieberman, president of Deallocker, and a man who runs focused sites for consumers, like TypoBuddy (for finding deals based on misspellings in eBay and Craigslist postings), the new Buy-discount-gift-cards.com (a front end to Lieberman's eBay sales of gift cards), and the "Secret Amazon Discount Finder" section of DealLocker. None of his sites is technically ground-breaking. And, like FreeShippingOn, some are based on the erroneous economic proposition that getting dollars off a retail price is more important than the actual out-of-pocket dollars the product costs you. But as I said, that's not the point. The point is that people look for very specific things online, and the businesses who know the mind of the consumer--and not necessarily what's right or sensible--are the ones that make the bucks.
FedEx's new Adobe AIR package tracker.
(Credit: CNET Networks)FedEx was on hand today to show off its new Adobe AIR application for tracking packages.
Similar to tracking widgets you may have seen on tools such as Apple's Dashboard and Yahoo's Widget engine, you can keep small widgets on your desktop that update and let you know when that digital camera you ordered online mistakenly got delivered somewhere three states over. But that's not the sole use. The application doubles as command center for business users and frequent shippers to keep track of what's going on with several of their packages at once.
The company hopes small business users will take advantage of the application to help them manage shipped packages and make certain they get to their destination. Likewise, anyone who wants to keep tabs on purchased items can simply use the application as a more powerful tracking tool. Eventually, FedEx intends to upgrade the AIR application to support things such as shipping labels and integrating business contacts--things its software applicaiton takes care of.
The application is set to release in beta within the next month and will be limited to U.S. shipments, although there are plans to expand to International shipments.
Lick and stick, or pick and pack? I don't know. And if you don't either, and you're trying to start an online store, you might want to check out Shipwire, which will handle your online business' shipping needs for you. Instead of having your suppliers ship goods to you that you then have to warehouse and ship to your customers, you ask your suppliers to send everything to Shipwire, which will handle all the heavy lifting, licking, sticking, and packing.
Unrelated: Eyejot is presenting right now. We posted an Eyejot review yesterday.
(Credit:
LicketyShip)
LicketyShip, a.k.a. Kozmo 2.0, is offering its service for free today. LicketyShip combines the best of online gadget shopping (easy browsing from your office while you appear to be working), with the one good thing about physical retail: You get the product right away. Today and tomorrow, LicketyShip is free. Use the code LSFREE at checkout.
When you buy something on LicketyShip, the service gets the product for you at a retailer it has a relationship with and delivers it into your hands by courier within four hours. At the moment, the service is in beta and delivers to only the Northern California Bay Area.
The company is experimenting with pricing for its service. When I first covered the company, it was $19.99. Free is better. (You still have to pay for your purchase, of course.)
Anybody who tries this, please report your experiences here.
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