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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>Amazon told shippers the service, known as Amazon Shipping, will be paused starting in June. It was available in just a handful of U.S. cities. Under the program, Amazon drivers would pick up packages from businesses and deliver them to consumers, rather than ship orders from Amazon warehouses.

How does that work? So it is like Instacart but with Amazon picking it up and delivering it? I don't see how could that scale.

Edit: Incase this isn't clear, I have placed an order for 6 items in 6 different shops. If all these items were in Amazon Warehouse, they would have packaged together and shipped from One Destination. Just reading from the sentence it seems Amazon Shipping will have to go to 6 different places to pick up the package. It is the case that One to Many scale, many to many / one is difficult.

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In the UK pretty much every courier offers a pickup service. You book it in, they give you a label to print, they turn up and take it. It's probably exactly like that. If you order from 6 shops, they ship 6 packages to you.

Some couriers (DPD? UPS?) in the UK take this a step further and will even come with the label ready to stick on the box.

Great if you don't have access to a printer.

I recall (perhaps incorrectly) that Royal Mail once offered a service where you could buy an "online stamp", then you would write a long string of letters and numbers above the address on the envelope to send it. It was distinct from freepost.

The Swiss Post currently has a stamp-by-SMS service for normal letters where upon sending an SMS to an automated system, you are charged the normal stamp price using the premium SMS system, and you receive a sequence (8-10 characters long IIRC) which you write where a stamp would normally go at the top-right of the envelope. It's far more convenient than having to remember to buy stamps in advance or typically going out of your way to a post office just to mail a letter as mail boxes, by contrast, exist seemingly all over the place.

"So, what's your hobby?"

"I collect 10 character long strings."

> I don't see how could that scale.

Similarly to UPS and FedEx, one would assume.

I don't see how could that scale.

If Amazon delivery drivers are moving around a city anyway then it isn't necessarily much additional work to pick up packages along the way as well as dropping them off. They presumably collaborate rather than having one driver do everything - so 6 different drivers pick up the items, bring them back to a central location, and from there it's just another standard Amazon delivery with 6 items in it.

Moreso like UPS or Fedex than Instacart, as the Amazon employees aren't picking up unpackaged, unlabeled its.

I was thinking if they were around the city, you wouldn't have a van going out full and returning empty to the warehouse.

It could be going out full, returning full.

I also assume it would be getting a volume of pickups from the businesses, not just one.

Amazon driver pick up packages from non-Amazon warehouse, delivers it to consumers.

It scales fine, it's just planned in reverse. Many-to-one is how trash pickup and other services are handled in the US. You have the same number of stops whether you deliver to, or pick up from.

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