In case receiving your purchases at your doorstep within an hour isn't convenient enough, Amazon now has a new answer: deliveries to the trunk of your car.
The Seattle e-commerce giant said Wednesday that it's starting a small test program in Germany -- along with German delivery company DHL and German automaker Audi -- to provide shipments to car trunks. The test starts next month.
The service will be provided only to a select group of Amazon Prime members in the Munich area who own Audi vehicles, but the plan is to expand these types of deliveries well beyond that small sliver of the Amazon buying population.
The test "is the first step toward eventually offering Amazon Prime members around the world the ability to use the trunk of their car as a delivery location," an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement.
The new service is just one more method Amazon is trying out to make buying on its website as easy as possible and make itself more competitive against brick-and-mortar retailers. The company offers free two-day deliveries for its Prime members, who pay $99 a year for that perk and others. On top of that, Amazon has been expanding a new one-hour deliveries service in the US, called Prime Now. The company also offers same-day delivery on groceries and dry goods in certain markets and has been testing out delivery drones.
In addition to deliveries to specific addresses, Amazon also lets customers ship their goods to its lockers, which are housed in supermarkets, convenience stores and other locations.
Here's Amazon's explanation on how the "Car Trunk Delivery" service works:
During the checkout process, customers simply indicate the approximate location of their car during the delivery window. When a carrier driver arrives, the vehicle's car trunk can be momentarily accessed via a unique, order specific digital authorization. The delivery agent then simply places the order into the trunk and closes the hatch which locks the car again.
Trunk deliveries may not catch on, but Amazon is well-known for experimenting with new ideas -- and sometimes failing along the way -- in hopes of finding its next big market.
