As it has been doing frequently of late, Amazon was out with a blog post touting its same day delivery performance in the just ended first quarter.
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CNBC reports that Amazon has already opened up more than 55 same-day delivery sites in the US, primarily clustered around major metro areas.
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As it has been doing frequently of late, Amazon was out with a blog post touting its same day delivery performance in the just ended first quarter.
Amazon announced that nearly 60% of orders placed through its Prime membership program in the top 60 US metro areas arrived the same or next day. That is up from about 50% in the second quarter of 2023.
Amazon said that that percentage also translated into than two billion items arriving the same or next day to Prime members around the world.
Prime started out in 2005 offering free two-day shipping for over one million items, with an annual membership fee of $79.
Jump to 2024, and the annual fee is now $139 – but with that comes ever faster delivery, as the numbers above attest, even though the promise is still two-day free. Now some 300 million items are included with Prime.
However, Amazon has said has said it plans to make same- and next-day delivery the new standard. Two that end, Amazon expects to double the number of same-day delivery sites it operates in the US over the next few years.
And Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, as Jeff Bezos before him, sees this delivery speed as giving the company competitive advantage.
“As we get items to customers this fast, customers choose Amazon to fulfill their shopping needs more frequently,” Jassy wrote in his letter to shareholders in early April. “And we can see the results in various areas including how fast our everyday essentials business is growing (over 20% y/y in Q4 2023).”
Perhaps surprisingly, in many cases getting product to the customer more rapidly can actually mean lower cost. For example, in 2023 Amazon divided its fulfillment network into eight regions that each carry almost all of its SKUs, reducing the number of long-haul moves.
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 Amazon says that with this network design, its cost-to-serve for delivery was down in 2023 by more than 45 cents per unit versus 2022.
CNBC reports that Amazon has already opened up more than 55 same-day delivery sites in the US, primarily clustered around major metro areas. These facilities are about 100,000 square feet in size, much smaller compared to a typical Amazon fulfillment center, which can be the size of 26 football fields. These delivery sites a carry a smaller selection of SKUs that are high demand items in each local metro market.
Amazon rivals have hardly stood pat. In 2023, Walmart announced a program offering delivery items times of as little as 30 minutes, while in March Target launched a new loyalty program that offers same-day delivery on orders more than $35 in as little as an hour.
Both Walmart and Target leverage their vast store networks to reduce delivery times to often nearby consumers.
The full Amazon blog post this week is available here.
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