The Guardian has a great article today called How Our Home Delivery Habit Reshaped the World. It goes into the logistics side of modern eCommerce, the ways in which it’s impacting on our cities and lives, and is well worth a read if you’ve ever ordered anything online. Halfway through there’s a great little nugget about EA’s FIFA series, which serves to illustrate just how popular the game is, how loyal its fanbase is, and how Amazon gets it to them so quickly.
The answer is simple: the shopping behemoth knows who’s going to buy it and where they live, before any of those individuals have clicked a single button to that end.
The article’s author Samanth Subramanian spoke to Robin Woodbridge, who works for a company that builds and runs logistic parks, about the rise of data analytics and the pressure to get delivery schedules from days to hours.
Woodbridge remembers how, while visiting a shipping provider’s facility a few years ago, he saw a curious pile of Amazon parcels.
“I said: ‘They haven’t got any names on them. Who are they for?’” he told me. The packages held video games, it turned out: the newest edition of the annual FIFA series by Electronic Arts. “And they said: ‘Amazon knows, if you’ve bought the game for the last three years or whatever, that you’re likely to buy it again.’ So they’ve already got it packaged up for you, waiting for you to press the button. You do that, and they’ll stick your name on it, and it’s gone.”
In this particular context Woodbridge is discussing smaller distribution centres, which are used as geographical ‘spokes’ around a company’s central warehouses – so that stuff can be dispatched closer to its destination, and thus be delivered faster. The takeaway is not that Amazon knows a lot of people are going to buy the new FIFA, so much as ‘Amazon has a pretty good idea of exactly who is definitely going to buy FIFA, pre-packages and pre-delivers ‘their’ copy to a local distribution centre, and waits for the click.
We’re so inured to analytics, online tracking, and targeted advertising, that it’s rare such things even raise my eyebrows. It’s been common knowledge for years that companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook place huge value on predicting what we want, before we realise ourselves that we want it. I’d never considered, though, that it had expanded to the extent that ‘my’ copy of FIFA is already picked-out, packaged, and Amazon is only waiting for this predictable little brain to catch up and buy it.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour from the British isles.
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