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Are Amazon’s drones feasible? And will they be the final nail in the high street’s coffin?

It’s retail focus week on Bdaily. Here, Matt Skinner, managing editor of BusinessesForSale.com, explores the impact the Amazon Drone, planned to be introduced by 2018, will have on traditional retailers.

Amazon is testing unmanned drones to deliver goods to customers, the online retail giant announced this week.

Chief Executive Jeff Bezos claims the drones, with an operating radius of 10 miles, will be able to deliver payloads of up to 2.3kg (roughly equivalent to 3 hardback books) within 30 minutes of an order being placed.

The announcement – conveniently coinciding with the busiest online shopping day of the year - resulted in an avalanche of coverage for Amazon, much of which highlighting just how unfeasible the project is. Indeed, the infrastructure required in order to launch such a fleet of drones is mind boggling, and its limitations become obvious after even the most cursory of assessments.

Is the use of drones legal? How expensive are they to manufacture and maintain? Who will operate them? How will the weather effect them? Will they be able to operate in high winds? Are they safe for wildlife? How/where will they land? What if an order is placed from a flat or office above ground level? The questions continue, and paint a picture of a project that would appear to be a logistical nightmare for the retailer and prohibitively expensive for the consumer.

So, unless Amazon know something we do not (and it’s entirely possible that they do), the announcement is little more than a (admittedly fantastic) publicity stunt.

However, the announcement raises a very real question about the long-term future of the traditional retail model.

The one remaining advantage the high street has had over online shopping - out side of the intangible ‘community’ aspect pushed by schemes such as the Portas Pilot - is speed of delivery.

Provided the product required is in stock at a location the consumer can reach, a physical shop offers a same-day service that online retailers have, as yet, been unable to beat.

This will not always be the case. Indeed, Amazon currently offer a same-evening delivery service within London and selected postcode areas across the country, but at £14.99 per delivery - 3 times more expensive than its next day delivery service – it’s prohibitively expensive to the casual shopper (one would imagine delivery by drone would be more expensive still).

Once online retailers do find a legitimate way to offer a same day service free, or at a considerably lower price, there’s a very strong argument that it will spell the end for the bricks and mortar shopping experience as we know it.

There are a number of delivery systems under development that, while nowhere near being an immediate threat, will legitimately change the retailing landscape in the coming decades.

Shortly after Amazon’s drone announcement, it was revealed that Google has purchased a number of robotics companies, which The New York times suggests is part of a project to develop a delivery system that will work in tandem with the company’s self-driving car.

But perhaps the biggest threat comes from 3D printer, the continuing rise of which threatens not only the future of the high street, but the very future of the physical products as a sellable commodity. As a consumer level product, the 3D printer is seen as little more than a novelty item right now, but the technology - capable of printing everything from a pen to a car, even food and drink, cheaply – is progressing at a tremendous rate, at a comparable stage to that of internet in the early 1990s. It’s just a matter of when, not if, a 3D printer can in every home.

According to Bezos, Amazon’s drones are due to launch by 2018.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by BusinessesForSale .