Google is Creating an Amazon Prime Competitor

With these companies constantly getting into each others' business, I'm reminded of the old joke:<p>Heaven is where the police are British, the lovers French, the mechanics German, the chefs Italian, and it is all organized by the Swiss.<p>Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German, and it is all organized by the Italians.<p>In just the last three years, Google has gotten into mobile devices, social networking and now allegedly e-commerce, Amazon now does full-on computing devices (with Google's OS) and Microsoft has the #2 search engine. This is getting hard to keep track of. And no wonder everyone keeps expecting Facebook to come out with a phone.<p>This report seems like the oddest one yet. Does a shipping service even qualify as organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful?

I've noticed in the past that Google has special provisions for: Navigation, Autonomous Vehicle Control, or Enterprise Applications in the terms of use - <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html</a> - 10.2c.<p>Google has all the data to know the exact steps between the location of the product in inventory and the location of the doorstep of the customer. I could see them reducing cost of delivery in the following ways:<p>1. Using automated routing tools to allocate delivery resources in real-time. Currently, a human dispatcher can account for up to 35% of the cost of a same-day local delivery. Straight from an algorithm to a mobile phone is cheaper.<p>2. Using delivery contractors to collect video data to help build in the direction of an even richer google maps street view.<p>3. Eventually using autonomous vehicles to replace the human driver. I'm not saying this will happen any time soon, but I could see certain sections of city roads being approved for autonomous vehicle use in the next 3-5 years. Especially if google is pushing it while demonstrating safety. Paying a human driver can account for up to 60% of the cost of a same-day local delivery.<p>Also, there are some intangible aspects of having the relationship with a customer at their doorstep. Creates some advertising opportunities and gives nice contextual data about the customer.<p>Anyhow, being fairly familiar with the space I think Amazon and Google moving in this direction will really evolve online retail. More shipping options on products; more goods being shipped locally (for cheaper); more control over the delivery chain; visibility of exactly where your package is on the way to your house. That is the kind of innovation we can expect to see if google finds a way to leverage its data towards lower delivery cost.

Until Google demonstrates that they understand how to handle customer service I will never use this service. Google is horrible when it comes to dealing with customers.

If there's one thing Amazon could use improvement on, is it's search results. Specifically, sorting them.<p>Seriously, I just tried it now. My complaints:<p>- Why do I have to pick a department to sort? (I can kind of understand this, but it's annoying)<p>- Why isn't shipping taken into account when I sort?<p>- Why are used and new prices mixed when sorting?<p>While I understand that Amazon can't read my mind, there are certain product categories (cell phone cases, for example) where it's like panning for gold. You need to spend a non-trivial amount of time digging for a quality case for a good price.<p>I don't have a solution, but it certainly feels harder than it needs to be. Searching on newegg.com feels so much better, but I suppose they have the advantage of having a very narrow focus.

For awhile there was this general sense that Google was doing a little bit of everything and getting involved in everyone else's business (the root of the "what if Google decided to enter this market" question).<p>However, lately they've been making the news for the products they're no longer focusing on (Wave, other Labs, etc.). Could it be that with things like the UI refresh, Google+ and a shipping service (and a host of other initiatives), they're attempting to connect more with people and put out a "human touch"?

Google is dipping its hand at EVERYTHING I wouldn't be surprised if it would go and compete with a custom cupcake business soon (taste graph + location + social "share my cupcake" potential)

This has to be a part of the Google Check out, which means the vendor integrating the API must opt to honor it (assuming they do not make it mandatory). I don't understand why vendor's would want to participate in it though. It does not give them any competitive advantage over their competitors since this is available to everyone else. So unlike amazon where they have a lock-in advantage with Prime, Google is not really offering it to its customers.