Amazon patented shipping a package toward you before you finish ordering.

Online delivery took days because freight could not move until an order existed; the obvious fix was to build more warehouses closer to customers so the final hop was shorter.

Amazon's answer went the other way: predict and pre-ship. A method filed in August 2012 and granted on Christmas Eve 2013 packages a predicted item and sends it toward a chosen geographical area, and only completes the delivery address while the package is already in transit.

The patent U.S. 8,615,473 makes that explicit: ship to a region first, resolve the address on the road. TechCrunch described it as Amazon "pre-shipping" so goods arrive before the buyer's click, collapsing the last leg into a few hours.

By staging inventory as a geo-positioned buffer rather than a warehouse stockpile, the plan hid most of the delivery time inside forecasting, which is what made one-day delivery conceivable at all.

Start shipping before the order exists

Moving freight before the order takes most of the delivery time out of the customer-facing path.

Shipping to a region, not an address, lets the last mile be assigned only when it is known.

It turns inventory into a moving buffer positioned near demand instead of a stockpile waiting for an order.

When speed is the product, move work before the customer acts instead of only building more warehouses to shorten a pipeline that still starts at the click.

Granted in December 2013 and covered as anticipatory shipping, the patent became a symbol of Amazon's predictive-logistics ambition and fed the same real-time fulfillment race through same-day hub placement, warehouse robotics and one-day Prime. No literal "your order just shows up" product ever shipped, but the forecast-and-stage-before-the-click logic became standard across e-commerce.