Soon, courier services will be out of business and their employees will be out of job. That’s because Amazon, U.S. largest Internet-based company, will deploy thousands of drones in delivery service. Amazon announced proposals for a drone delivery service called Amazon Prime Air in December 2013. The company’s supremo – Jeff Bezos – wants to use small drones to deliver packages up to 2.3kg (5lb) in weight.

 

If everything goes as planned, this would enable customers to receive a purchase within 30 minutes of placing an order. Six drone operators were approved by the U.S. to carry out commercial flight tests at around the same time as Prime Air was announced but Amazon was not among them. Successful applicants included the University of Alaska, Griffiss International Airport in New York and North Dakota’s Department of Commerce.

Besides Amazon, Google and DHL are also exploring the use of drones as couriers. Amazon, which already has a drone R&D lab in Cambridge in the UK, is now threatening to conduct its future drone research “outside” the U.S. because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been dragging its feet for flights-testing approval, submitted since July, thanks to the U.S. strict regulation.

 

Unlike U.S. rules which make the commercial use of drones, including test flights, illegal, the same cannot be said about England. In UK, experimental flights don’t require a special license and pilots are only expected to follow general rules such as staying away from large crowds and airports. So far, the UK government has already issued more than 300 licenses for commercial drone use with the majority used for photography and filming.

Amazon Prime Air drones project is important to ensure better delivery system and hence higher sales and revenue to the US$144 billion company. In a latest twist to pick up more business during the present holiday season, Amazon has a new offering to customers. Just like competitors eBay and Priceline, the company announced the “Make an Offer” experience that allows you to negotiate even lower prices on thousands of items.

 

Here’s how it works: Sellers enable the “Make an Offer” feature for items to show customers they are willing to negotiate for a lower price than the price listed. When selecting “Make an Offer” on an item’s product detail page, a customer can enter and submit a new price of their choosing. The seller will receive the customer’s lower price offer through email, at which point the seller can accept, reject or counter the offer.

The seller and customer can continue to negotiate through email until the negotiation is complete. When a seller accepts a customer’s offer, the customer is notified and can place the item into their shopping cart at the agreed upon new price for checkout and purchase. Unlike traditional fixed price model, the “Make an Offer” experience gives customers more control and better deals than they may have received prior to this program.

 

You’ve to take note that the “Make an Offer” feature is “not” an auction format. All negotiations are one-to-one and private between individual customers and sellers. For the time being, this new feature is applicable to more than 150,000 items initially, featuring Sports and Entertainment Collectibles, Collectible Coins and Fine Art. Amazon says it will extend it to “hundreds of thousands of items” by 2015.

So take note – whether you’re a seller or buyer on Amazon, you should enable and take advantage of this latest “Make an Offer” feature. Go make an offer sellers won’t refuse to sell. Most importantly, the negotiation experience will hopefully get more communication between you and your customers. Obviously, Amazon hopes this will be like a Black Friday sale 365 days a year.

 

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December 10th, 2014 by financetwitter

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