Amazon plans on making Prime deliveries even faster
Currently, if you pay £79 per year to Amazon, you can get nearly anything you order from the site within two days. If you live in a major city, items can sometimes arrive the next day or faster, and the company wants to expand that kind of ridiculous luxury to more of its customers, wherever they live.
The news came on an earnings call on Thursday, reported by CNET, in which the company’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky outlined the dream to investors. “We’re currently working on evolving our Prime shipping program, which has historically been a two-day program, to a one-day shipping program,” he explained.
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“We’ll be building most of this capacity through the year, in 2019. We expect to make steady progress quickly and through the year.”
The company intends to spend $800 million on the improvements to its logistics network, starting with the United States. As you might expect, the hope is that with a guaranteed faster delivery, more people will end up as Prime members, which will “open up a lot of potential purchases” to them.
It may seem obvious to highlight that the move is intended to help Amazon sell even more things, but it’s worth repeating that this is the ultimate aim of everything the company develops, from Echoes to Kindles. Even Prime Video is designed to sell seemingly unrelated items, with CEO and founder Jeff Bezos memorably explaining in 2016 that “when we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” because it requires a Prime account which opens up free shipping and impulse purchases.
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Faster shipping is a more direct way of doing that, and it’s no wonder Amazon is trying to smooth out the process. The route to faster deliveries is obvious in big cities, some of which already have two-hour delivery windows on Prime Now items – locations in remote villages will be a significantly tougher nut to crack.
Would even faster shipping make you pay more for Prime? Let us know on Twitter: @TrustedReviews.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
