Amazon Is Testing a New Delivery Service to Ship More Goods, Faster
A shipping experiment that started in India has made it to America’s West Coast and could spread across the U.S. sometime next year. That’s according to a new report by Bloomberg, which suggests that a new in-house Amazon delivery service will help it get more third-party goods to shoppers for free inside two days.
The trial, which is called Seller Flex, has Amazon taking over control of shipping decisions from some third-party sellers, says Bloomberg. In some cases Amazon may deliver the goods, in others it would use firms like UPS and FedEx that currently ship many of the e-tailer’s wares. The move is meant to give Amazon a way to leverage its logistics chops to get goods to people more efficiently. That could allow it to assert its dominance in retail even further.
It’s not the first time rumors have swirled about Amazon taking more of its package logistics on for itself. Last year, there was speculation that the e-tailer sought to build a more flexible kind of shipping service that could enable it to, for instance, provide after-hours deliveries.
To find out more about how companies work out the best way to make deliveries, read our recent article on the increasingly complex algorithms that get packages to your door.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.