Let me begin by acknowledging my sincere admiration for Amazon’s creativity and innovation. With that said, I think their latest and greatest initiative comes with a huge caveat that could blow up in their face.

Amazon has recently stepped into uncharted territory with some revolutionary new ideas on product delivery and marketing. One of them was doorstep delivery by drones, another was delivering packages on Sundays, and now the ecommerce giant has registered a patent for “anticipatory shipping”.

Anticipatory shipping is exactly what it sounds like: products are preemptively shipped to your geographical vicinity, and in some cases straight to your door without you actually ordering them.

(A diagram from Amazon’s patent for anticipatory shipping, demonstrating the relationship between analyzed customer browsing behaviors and eventual promotional offers.)

They’ll reportedly decide what to “offer” or ship you based on your browsing activity: your search history, what you’ve purchased before, and even the products you hover your mouse over the longest. Much of what they’ve described in the patent is clever in concept, and Amazon has outlined a thorough system for how products will be speculatively shipped for efficient results.

Nobody is denying that Amazon has their ducks in a row with advanced consumer research, site analytics and targeted marketing tactics. But no matter how sophisticated their behavioral research is, they’re never going to know the customer’s finer, underlying purchase intentions.

Consider this: A computer doesn’t know whether you’ve been shopping for yourself, or your nephew, or your mother-in-law, or your boss. Analytics and tracking software has no way of knowing your unspoken buying rationale, so the data gathered by Amazon can only be so accurate in this respect.

This is where their otherwise brilliant idea runs into a huge hitch. Amazon will be paying to preemptively ship their products to speculatively interested buyers based on their research into browsing and buying patterns; but many times these patterns don’t reflect an independent buyer’s personal interests. The data is intrinsically flawed by its limits.

And what happens when targeted marketing is targeting the wrong people, for the wrong reasons?

They’ll ignore it

Exhibit A: A site visitor has been back and forth in your shopping cart looking through the newest releases for the Xbox One. It seems pretty evident that they love video games, because your site’s analytics show the visitor has spent a total of 3.5 hours on the site and revisited the same page 5 times. So you “anticipatorily” ship a copy of the zombie survival hit Dead Rising 3 to your customer, offering them a great discounted price to purchase and keep it.

But guess what? It turns out your trigger happy site visitor was a 78-year-old grandmother bumbling around for a Christmas gift to make her 14-year-old grandson happy on the holidays. And who’s to say she hasn’t already purchased her gift elsewhere? The last thing she’s interested in spending 50 dollars on is a shoot-em-up video game for herself, so she leaves that package right where she found it – on the front step.

They’ll become irritated

Consider the targeted marketing you run into first hand on search engines, social media and paid banner ads every day.

Does this look familiar?

This, my friends, is the most common targeted marketing you’ll find on the Web. It’s Google AdWords, and it pushes ads for products and services you’ve recently viewed back in front of you as you navigate elsewhere on the Internet.

Yes, I am a photographer, and I occasionally spend time shopping for myself. But in this case I was price shopping for my boss at work, and as a result I get to see ads for very expensive wide angle lenses that I’m neither interested in or able to afford. It gets old quick, and I never thought I’d say this, but frankly I’m sick of looking at pretty camera gear that’s out of my wallet’s league.

Similarly, people who lack interest in your product won’t take well to a surprise delivery and sales pitch. And they’re definitely not going to be thrilled with the added responsibility of return shipping.

The company will pay for it

Anticipatory shipping is a big, bold gamble. And the result of failed, aggressive targeted marketing means a significant margin of wasted shipping expenses on Amazon’s part.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself with my own anticipatory thoughts, but it could also mean a firestorm of aggravated customers who aren’t fond of pushy promotions at their door. Customer service could have a royal calamity on their hands – not to mention an ensuing social media outcry if Amazon customers perceive the surprise deliveries as extra-large junk mail.

At this point, we really only know a bit about how this system may function. Only time will tell if the minority report of doorstep delivery booms or flops.