Amazon reveals plans to double the number of same day delivery sites in the US

Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, has reported that the e-commerce giant plans double the number of same day delivery sites in the US in the coming years.

In an article posted on the AboutAmazon.com website yesterday (31 July), Herrington reflected on how the company has expanded its delivery capacity since it launched Prime in 2005, and claimed: “Amazon [now] delivers more products and faster speeds for customers, while continuing to lower costs and improve employee safety.”

And he reported: “So far this year, we’ve delivered more than 1.8 billion units to U.S. Prime members the same or next day – nearly four times what we delivered at those speeds by this point in 2019.”

Herrington explained that Amazon has introduced a range of innovations to ramp up its delivery offering, including ”regionalizing” its US operations network and introducing “increasingly advanced machine learning algorithms to better predict which items customers in various parts of the country will want and when they will want them”.

He highlighted the development of Amazon’s Same-Day facilities – which are “smaller buildings situated close to the large metro areas they serve”.

Herrington explained why Amazon will be looking to expand this network: “These buildings are designed for speed with smaller footprints, streamlined conveyors, and picking directly to pack stations. As a result, the average time from picking a customer’s items to positioning the customer’s package on the outbound dock is 11 minutes in Same-Day facilities, more than an hour faster than our traditional fulfillment centers. And these hybrid facilities allow us to fulfill, sort, and deliver all from one site—making the entire process of delivering customer packages even faster. Selection varies by city, as we regularly update our product offering based on what we’re seeing as top customer items purchased or based on seasonal demand in the area. And with connections to the larger Amazon fulfillment centers nearby, we dramatically increase the number of items available for fast delivery.”

And then Herrington outlined the expansion plan: “Same-Day Delivery is currently available on millions of items for customers across more than 90 U.S. metro areas, and we have plans to double the number of sites in the coming years.”

Herrington maintained that the expansion will be good for both Amazon and its customers.

“Our Same-Day Delivery network is not only our fastest way to get products to customers,” he said, “it is also one of our lowest cost ways. Lowering costs drives a better customer experience, because the lower our cost to serve customers gets, the more products our vendors and selling partners can make available in our store—meaning our selection keeps getting better for customers.”