Amazon Planning To Sell You Things Before You Know You Want To Buy Them

Amazon seems to think that it knows what you want better than you do. So in its quest for global commerce domination, Amazon is working on a plan that would ship products to you before you even purchase them, the Wire reported.

In a strange pre-cognition-like system that Amazon plans to implement in order to trim delivery times, a new patent for "anticipatory shipping" was discovered by the Verge.

Based on the shopping habits of the people who live in different areas of the country, Amazon will ship products to them accordingly.

The new system will use "previous searches and purchases, wish lists, and how long the user's cursor hovers over an item online," to determine where the products will go, the Verge reported. The patent said that Amazon can put something on a truck and have it "speculatively shipped to a physical address."

According to the Wire, "Products that regularly sell in different areas are shipped to those areas more often, because they will sell. But sometimes, the patent goes on to explain, Amazon will ship products to your door whether or not you actually purchased anything. Sometimes Amazon will ship something to a particular area, then find someone shopping for that product online and offer the product at a discounted rate. It's already there, so they have to sell it, right?"

In another scenario, whether or not you actually purchased a slowcooker, Amazon is willing to risk that you won't be too upset when another slowcooker arrives at your doorstep. Instead, the company is hoping that you'll return it, pay for it, or take the gift and come back for more business later, the Wire reported.

"Delivering the package to the given customer as a promotional gift may be used to build goodwill," the patent said.

The new space that Amazon is now entering allows the data to take the decision making out of your hands and purchase something without letting you even press the "check-out" button. Even though there's no plan to implement this system into Amazon's current set-up, the server predicting our purchases based on something as minute as how long our cursor hovers over a product is the kind of meta-data collection that we should be concerned about, the Wire reported.