Amazon to trial in-home delivery using smart home devices to gain access
Amazon.com Inc. may soon deliver goods not only to the outside of your home but inside of it as well, even when you’re not there.
It may sound like magic, or alternatively breaking and entering. But the ability to deliver goods inside of your home in your absence will be through the use of smart home lock maker August Home Inc. and smart garage door maker Garageio (Alottazs Labs LLC), which are working with Amazon on a way to give delivery drivers access to place ordered goods inside the home.
According to C/Net, the process would work like this: when you make a purchase from Amazon store, you can opt for an in-home delivery, allowing the courier one-time access to your home via an August-locked door or Garageio-controlled garage. During delivery, the courier is able to gain access by using an access key delivered by a delivery app, leaving your package safely inside.
The advantage of the proposed system is that customers will not have to worry about someone stealing their package, and for Amazon it would mean they could also use less packaging for a given item, potentially cutting costs and waste.
Major limitation
While most certainly an interesting idea, it has one major limitation, and that’s the number of people who have smart front door locks and garages. Much as been said about the Internet of Things smart home revolution, including predictions that the market could be as high as $121.73 billion by 2022, but unless you live in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, it’s highly unlikely you’re going to have an installed smart front door lock or garage.
Amazon will undoubtedly be betting that adoption will increase rapidly in the years ahead. There may eventually come a time where smart home devices are standard installations in new buildings, but that time is still a ways off. Until then, the market will remain primarily dominated by those who are seriously into Internet-connected devices, not the mainstream consumer.
Image credit: Garageio
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