● Watch Now


NewsParcel Freight

Amazon unveils deferred ground delivery service

Service promises deliveries in 5 days or less

Mark Solomon
·
Amazon rolls out deferred ground delivery business (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has launched a non-urgent ground delivery service that appears to be aimed in part at shippers that don’t use Amazon for retail ordering or its fulfillment services.

The service, called Amazon Shipping, is designed for shippers placing orders through Amazon’s marketplace, a shipper’s own website and “other selling channels,” according to information on the company’s website.

Ground deliveries will be made in five days or less, Amazon said on the site. This underscores the deferred-delivery nature of the service. Support will be available 24/7, it said. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

With rare exceptions, Amazon provides deliveries to merchants who order from its marketplace and who use the company’s Fulfillment by Amazon fulfillment and delivery services. The company has long considered getting into the stand-alone shipping business, which would put it in direct competition with other parcel-delivery carriers. But it has never pulled the trigger.

It planned to roll out such a service in February 2020. However, the subsequent surge in pandemic-related delivery demand forced the company to table the idea in order to manage the tsunami of business that headed its way once e-commerce demand took off.

The website note did not provide details on how Amazon would manage the business. It does not provide pickups except on rare occasions.


Amazon’s average daily volume is about 12 million packages a day, according to ShipMatrix Inc., a consultancy. Amazon does not publish average daily volume figures.

Amazon is UPS Inc.’s largest customer with about 7.5% of revenue, down from 11% in 2021. The companies are slowly winding down their business relationship, with UPS shedding Amazon parcels that don’t meet specific profitability criteria.

In the second quarter, UPS’ deferred volume dropped 22.4% year-over-year, compared to 12.1% for express and 8.6% for ground, according to ShipMatrix. The reduced Amazon business is responsible for the significant deferred-volume decline, ShipMatrix said.

One Comment

Comments are closed.

Mark Solomon

Formerly the Executive Editor at DC Velocity, Mark Solomon joined FreightWaves as Managing Editor of Freight Markets. Solomon began his journalistic career in 1982 at Traffic World magazine, ran his own public relations firm (Media Based Solutions) from 1994 to 2008, and has been at DC Velocity since then. Over the course of his career, Solomon has covered nearly the whole gamut of the transportation and logistics industry, including trucking, railroads, maritime, 3PLs, and regulatory issues. Solomon witnessed and narrated the rise of Amazon and XPO Logistics and the shift of the U.S. Postal Service from a mail-focused service to parcel, as well as the exponential, e-commerce-driven growth of warehouse square footage and omnichannel fulfillment.