Rendition X

Ingredients

1 developer

2 bottles of wine

Cooking time

1 weekend

Instructions – preheat oven to…

Offer a modified Pro Merchant shopping cart  and order processing service to Brand Manufactures.  i.e. Modify the current service to ask consumers during checkout (in addition to their preferred shipping method) if they would like the option of local in store pickup.  This may be done on Amazon.com or on the Brand Manufacturer’s e-commerce website utilizing Amazon’s Web Services.  Amazon processes the online order and authorizes payment. Amazon enhances the merchant open orders dashboard (controlled by the Brand Manufacturer) to allow authorized retailer/dealers access to select open order information so retailer/dealers may bid for fulfillment rights on the orders for which they have products in stock.  The geographically closest authorized dealer of the Brand that is carrying inventory wins the order.  The Consumer is notified that product is available locally for in store pickup.  The Consumer may show up at the retailer/dealer with the same Credit Card and pickup the products OR choose to have the original delivery instructions applied to the order.  The retailer/dealer fulfills the order (pick, packs and ships or puts aside for pickup) and triggers Amazon to process the Credit Card. Amazon pays the retailer/dealer on 1st & 15th of each month the winning bid price and keeps the difference between the bid and what the consumer paid.  Alternatively a fixed percentage of the retailer’s average gross margin for an item could be used to calculate the item processing fee. This would be added to the payment processing fee which the retailer would have to pay for any credit card used in their store anyway.

That’s it. In store pickup when available for every product.

Once enough authorized retailer/dealers (this isn’t eBay- so keep the riff raff out of the marketplace) are bidding for fulfillment rights on items, they may start sharing their inventory and price feeds with Amazon and the Brand Manufacturers in order to eliminate the latency in the delivery/pick-up determination process. This will create a lowest price, closest to consumer fulfillment offer that could be backed by a garuantee. In the meantime a 24hr open order/bid window will not cause consumer dissatisfaction -  if anything it will increase consumer satisfaction for those who want what the want right away.  Amazon should also allow the Brand Manufacturers to cherry pick orders for in house fulfillment thus keeping the margin without the uncomfortable channel conflict conversations- after all it’s the Brand Manufacturers that are sending the retailer/dealers paying customers that may walk into the store and buy more products.

Why isn’t Amazon doing this yet?  They were/are doing something like this with Borders Books but I haven’t seen it in other categories.  One of my favorite start-ups, shopatron.com, is killing it with an offer like this.

Tags: Amazon Web Services, e commerce website, in store pickup, payment processing, Shopatron, shopping cart

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Halfbaked business/product ideas, Rants & Raves, Thoughts on technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.