I gave Amazon a key to my house and regretted it

Re:I gave Amazon a key to my house and regretted it by michaelt on Thursday December 07, 2017 @04:29PM (#15874462)

  an amazon locker on my front
  porch, that would solve the
  problem for everyone

The problem with delivery boxes is the time of the cost.

You can't charge for the box upfront without killing customer acquisition - most companies give new customers a discount, not a charge - and if you give the box away, you're $50+ in the hole for a customer who may never shop with you again, and you've got to charge more to recoup the costs of the box.

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Re:I gave Amazon a key to my house and regretted it by bdowling on Thursday December 07, 2017 @05:51PM (#15875136)

Amazon is charging $249 (plus installation costs) for the Amazon Key In-home Kit, which includes the smart lock and cloud camera. That’s more then the cost of a bolted-down box with a smart lock. The reason Amazon prefers this is described in the video. For Amazon this is a literal “foot in the door” and a path to selling you other services like cleaning and dog-walking. It’s not just about delivering packages.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I gave Amazon a key to my house and regretted it by jethro_tell on Thursday December 07, 2017 @04:57PM (#15874735)

I think the subset of people who would have a box installed and never use prime again and the people who would give away a key to their house for 1 delivery is pretty small.

At $50/box, I can outfit 20 million homes for 1 billion which is a 1x cost. If they are really loosing 7b on package theft every year, the one off loss of box cost should start offsetting that right away. A quick google shows that there are 90 million prime members in 2017, so they could do a box per prime member and pay it off in 9 mo. The second year they just save 7 billion. Am I missing something?

[ Parent | on HN ]