By 2018 our cities are set to be a lot busier, according to Amazon. Not only will we need to watch out for traffic and the umbrellas of jostling commuters as we walk down the street, we will also need to look out in the skies for descending drones – or octocopters as Amazon calls them.

Meeting the demands of busy online customers, these electricity-powered devices will be able to deliver goods to us within 30 minutes of ordering, beating the current one-hour and same-day delivery services that require good old-fashioned people to function.

Drones themselves are certainly not fiction. They are being used increasingly for filming and military operations and becoming cheaper and easier to programme. But could Amazon expect aviation authorities to give permission to use them for broader services such as online deliveries?

Such a service could work well in certain sectors. In food service, for instance, they could be used to fly our pizzas through the air to us without the need for a delivery driver. However, quite apart from the logistics of having these things buzzing around our heads, the technology appears to be far from ready to use at present.

Firstly, the service would need to rely on a very accurate GPS service in order to pinpoint the exact house, doorstep or letter box to which the delivery needs to be made, which is not widely in use today. In towns and cities there is the issue of landing the devices without colliding with people, vehicles or objects. In rural locations, distance from Amazon’s distribution centres and cost are likely to be inhibitors. This restricts usage to a very small area around Amazon’s fulfilment centres.

Bearing in mind that delivery drivers already have GPS and brains to help them find a suitable location to deliver our online orders - my personal experience over the last few months has seen my orders turn up with neighbours as the driver could not find my house and even in my recycling bin. So for me the idea of an octocopter being able to do any better is baffling. Unless it requires the customer to be there to greet it, in which case much of the convenience of online ordering is lost.

The timing of Bezos revelation has guaranteed much pubicity for Amazon today, Cyber Monday, the busiest day for online shopping this year. But as a company that has always been at the forefront of innovation, it makes sense for Amazon to explore these possibilities and to stay ahead of any potential competitor. Chief executive Jeff Bezos certainly has an interest in all things space and technology related and how better to combine the two within his business than via drones? However, the vision of parcels flying through the air still sounds very much like fantasy and likely to be a long way off, requiring much technological refinement if it is to happen at all.

In the meantime we can all enjoy the humour from Amazon rival Waterstones, which uploaded this excellent video to its YouTube site within hours of Amazon’s announcement.

Waterstones' OWLS delivery

Deliveries using O.W.L.S (Ornothological Waterstones Landing Service). I would love to see this happen!

Lisa Byfield-Green, retail analyst, Planet Retail