The speed of online deliveries has become critical competitive differentiator between retail brands. Same-day delivery programs in the UK, Walmart delivery crowdsourcing and Google Express have invented new programs to cover "the last mile" between the customer and their order as quickly as possible because that was something Amazon doesn't do.
Not anymore.
Amazon is allegedly playing with the "anticipatory shipping" patent, which selects items to be shipped to consumers before they even purchase them. In filtering which items we may want to buy before we know it, Amazon considers "previous orders, product searches, wish lists, shopping-cart contents, returns and even how long an Internet user’s cursor hovers over an item." (italics mine)
Demand prediction sounds like something from a sci-fi novel, but it isn't. The amounts of data that Amazon has is massive, and we, human beings, are much less fickle than what we'd like to think (enter here the entire debate on the free will).
For example, we buy bestseller books because they are bestsellers or that t-shirt because everyone else is wearing it or rain boots because it's raining - all Amazon needs to do is to pre-fill its shipment labels and patiently wait for us to click that buy button to fill in the rest.
The race for the last mile is becoming ever more interesting.