Amazon Wants Patent for All-You-Can-Eat Shipping 76
theodp writes "USPTO documents released Thursday show that Amazon is seeking a patent covering subscription-based shipping, aka Amazon Prime. Among the seven listed inventors is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has been singing the praises of Amazon Prime to Wall Street."
Re:I don't understand... (Score:2, Insightful)
It actually changed my buying habits (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that I have it, I don't even bother to try and combine orders. I just order when I want. Last week, I bought 2 ink cartridges for my ink jet for about $6 each. I ordered one in the morning and the other in the evening.
What Prime does though (and obviously the reason Amazon offers the service) is that when I want to order anything online, I always check Amazon first and in 95% of the cases, I order it from them.
Re:It actually changed my buying habits (Score:5, Insightful)
I do the same thing, and usually weigh the increased amazon cost against the pay-for-shipping, but cheaper unit-price vendor. It works, imo, because nobody else does it. If everybody had the option - say a Buy.com Prime membership - it would lose its value. I'm not going to pay three or four vendors $70/yr - it's only be aggragating a large percentage of my purchases in one place that makes it worthwhile. (I'm not sure there's a resonable logic in there, to be quite honest). Also, $3.99 for an overnight shipment of a reference book I really need or a gift I've forgotten to buy/send is a bargain compared to the usual shipping rates.