Coding and Beer

Ask anyone who purchases Amazon Prime and they will most likely say they love it.  It makes it quick and easy to purchase things on Amazon because you don’t go through the whole dance of comparing shipping costs of different sites. You know the price you see is what you are paying.

Now, imagine if FedEx and UPS decided to offer their own service instead. This new service could be subscription based just like Prime. You pay one yearly fee. For that, you get a FedEx or UPS account that you could use on ANY merchant website that uses their service.The process should go something like this:

1. Go to merchant website and pick out items.
2. Go through check out process.
3. When it gets to the shipping, you select FedEx or UPS Prime (or whatever branding they call it).
4. You then enter your credentials for your shipping account.
5. Done.

This would:

• Allow FedEx and UPS to get a subscription based fee (stabilizes their income streams a bit more).
• Allow customers to shop in more places besides Amazon.
• Allow sites to compete with Amazon on a more fair footing.
• Give the person more choice and less to worry about.

FedEx and UPS (or even the postal service) could all offer this. I know that Amazon eats it on some accounts, but probably wins with other accounts. Somehow they are making this work for them. If they can do it, so can the shippers. Even if they had tiered plans, I think it would work great. They could even be more strict than Prime by only picking up from vendors on certain days of the week (based on volume sold by vendor) or restricting delivery to certain days a week to customers. I can think of plenty more optimizations quickly.  They can still hold on to the old pay for what you ship model as well since not everyone would subscribe to this service.

Maybe I’m wrong about this.  Maybe there just isn’t a way to do this unless you eat some of the costs of shipping like Amazon does.  My thought is if nobody  in those companies are thinking about it yet, they should be.