Dive Brief:
- Amazon has relaunched a ground shipping service for sellers on its website, offering delivery on orders placed on Amazon.com, the sellers' own website and other channels.
- The service, called Amazon Shipping, provides delivery on packages weighing up to 50 pounds for Amazon sellers in two to five business days, including weekends. It covers domestic shipments within the contiguous U.S. and taps into the U.S. Postal Service "to fully cover all delivery destinations," according to its website.
- Amazon did not disclose shipping rates on its website, but it did note that the service does not charge residential fees or weekend delivery charges. The company did not respond to a request for comment for further information.
Dive Insight:
Amazon previously offered Amazon Shipping in a handful of cities before pausing the service in 2020, a year in which e-commerce demand surged and led the company to rapidly expand its fulfillment network.
The relaunched service being for only Amazon sellers limits its ability to compete directly with FedEx and UPS, but Amazon does have a sizable pool of independent businesses selling on its website.
"More than 60% of sales in the Amazon store come from independent sellers, and in 2022, U.S.-based sellers sold more than 4.1 billion items to customers worldwide, averaging more than $230,000 in sales in the Amazon store," Dharmesh Mehta, VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services, wrote last week.
With Amazon Shipping, the company is betting that many of these sellers would be interested in using its delivery network for orders outside the Amazon.com ecosystem.
Amazon still uses UPS and the Postal Service to deliver many of its customer orders, but it has reduced its reliance on UPS over the years as its own network has grown. Last year, the company's in-house delivery arm shipped 4.8 billion parcels in the U.S., outranking FedEx, according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index.
