3 ms·
Believe it or not, the origin is in question as well. Until the complete order is known, we can't make an optimal choice of which warehouse to ship from. We mig
by CWuestefeld 10y ago
Believe it or not, the origin is in question as well. Until the complete order is known, we can't make an optimal choice of which warehouse to ship from. We might want to get it to you faster by fulfilling it from the nearest warehouse, but if one of your products isn't in stock there, we may need to change strategy, selecting a different warehouse. That may not be the customer's problem directly, but if we try to hide it, then the difference is going to surface in the seller's expenses, and thus in the price.
- saosebastiao 10y agoThis is true. I actually worked with the "service" at Amazon that made these decisions. For a company with a single warehouse, or even multiple warehouses with equivalent inventory selections, you shouldn't face this problem. But with Amazon, where the entire inventory selection couldn't even fit in 20 warehouses, you end up with a terrible NP complete problem whose solution quality can make or break profitability on pretty much any product with less than a 10% gross margin. And I say "service" because you can't really fit into a service oriented architecture when you have solve times in excess of 5 minutes...the "service" is really just a way of dumping problems onto a queue to be passed downstream when done.