Shopping on Amazon is a great thing. Easy access to any of a host of items, any time of the day or night, all shipped directly to your front door or anywhere else shipment might be preferred. But there are some points of Amazon that are less than ideal. Buying clothes, for example, is a crap shoot, and trying to return things to Amazon that are broken or don't fit  -or otherwise don't work, can be an ordeal. Amazon, however, is eager to fix that, and is doing so by allowing users to return goods to Amazon lockers.

Amazon lockers are a phenomenon that crop up in certain metropolitan areas, and allow users to have goods sent to those lockers instead of to a home. With an Amazon locker, users can simply go to that locker to pick up any deliveries, which for some is an excellent alternative. Now, the stream can flow both ways, as users can take items needing return to the Amazon locker, deposit said item there, and consider it returned.

Shipping is easily one of the biggest expenses about Amazon. Even the simplest items can cost around 20 percent of total value to ship, and the larger, bulkier items can be costly to ship. For sellers that pay for shipping in both directions, meanwhile, returns just add to expenses and make a bad situation even worse. But with Amazon frantically building warehouses in urban areas to help cut down on shipping costs as well as improve shipping speed, the end result is that there's a lot of cash going into the operation, cash that Amazon might like to save, and so too its various vendors. Customers reportedly enjoy the extra convenience of being able to recover Amazon deliveries from a central point, and using the lockers as a return center certainly has some advantages of its own.

Yet oddly, this isn't a universal approach. Google (News - Alert) purchased BufferBox in late 2012, and reportedly announced earlier this year that it would take the service down completely, a development that came as a surprise to many. But with Walmart seen working in this space as well, it's a question of what does it see—and Amazon as well—that Google does not? Or conversely, what does Google know that Walmart and Amazon do not?

For those skeptical of the Amazon Locker concept, it's not hard to see why. Amazon lockers can only be found in so many places, so the reaction may be a bit tepid until Amazon Lockers are more widely available. For many, Amazon Lockers are just a thing that's heard of but never seen, like the Statue of Liberty or the Grand Canyon; people know it's there, but actually seeing one would take several hours of driving.

Still, it's a great idea, once Amazon can make its lockers available in more places. Many who would hesitate to buy clothing on Amazon might reconsider, knowing that an ill-fitting shirt is an easy return, or that a piece of furniture not so comfy as imagined could be taken back. Some things do still require a certain physical presence to be easily purchased, and an easy return policy for Amazon could be just what it needs to keep people interested in making purchases with the company. One day, delivery drones may bring all the small things right to our doorstep in a matter of hours, but until then, bearing a thought for the bigger purchases isn't a bad idea either.