Patent ID: 7295990

Claim:
A method for an item ordering service to currently supply ordered items to recipients in a manner that is selected based on modeled future costs of supplying expected future orders, the method comprising: receiving multiple orders, each order from a customer and indicating one or more items for delivery to a recipient; and for each of the multiple orders, determining a fulfillment plan specific to the order that minimizes future monetary costs of fulfilling expected future orders, the determining being performed in response to receiving the order and before the expected future orders are received, the determining including: determining multiple distinct fulfillment plans for supplying the items of the order to the recipient for the order, each fulfillment plan indicating for each of the items of the order that the item is to be shipped from an indicated one of multiple geographically distributed item distribution centers and indicating a manner of shipping the items from the indicated item distribution centers; for each of the determined distinct fulfillment plans for the order, modeling at least some of the future monetary costs of supplying expected future orders to recipients if the items of the order are supplied using that fulfillment plan, the modeling including, for each item distribution center indicated by the fulfillment plan to ship one or more indicated items, determining if the shipping of those indicated items by that item distribution center will result in an overload of work at that item distribution center when fulfilling expected future orders and will result in a shortage of inventory of those indicated items at that item distribution center when fulfilling expected future orders; and assigning the modeled future costs based at least in part on estimates of future costs for correcting any determined work overloads and any determined inventory shortages; selecting one of the determined fulfillment plans based at least in part on the modeled future costs of using that fulfillment plan to supply the items of the order; and indicating to supply the items of the order to the recipient for the order using the selected fulfillment plan.