The cost-effectiveness of a fast delivery network is related to the volume it moves. If there is always a full truck heading in the right direction packages don’t waste time and money sitting in warehouses. If every other retailer is helping UPS and FedEX fill their trucks, Flavor Flav will be singing “Amazon Prime is a joke in yo’ town”
Amazon is big but it is not big enough to be the best.
https://www.ajc.com/news/business/amazon-is-upss-biggest-cus...
A few times the order has been marked as delivered with a photo of what is clearly not my house and customer service didn't understand the problem. They refused to either re-deliver / refund because they had "proof" it was delivered. Only when I threatened to do a chargeback did they refund and then, once again, I had to start all over.
It's been weird shopping at other places because some of them take 4 to 5 days just to get an order out of the warehouse and then have awful return policies. It's a trade off for sure.
I ordered some small parts for my lab. The delivery person somehow sneaks past the guard/receptionist and dumps it in a random waiting room somewhere in a massive hospital/university complex. It took a coworker and I hours to find one package; another never turned up at all!
We try to get deliveries from elsewhere now because, as fun as scanvenger hunts are, I do have other stuff to do too…
I don't believe Amazon is a logistics company... or not a good one.
A UPS truck comes out to my rural neighborhood every day, 2-day shipping from the Northeast is straightforward in an efficient ground network. 3-day shipping from Texas to Upstate NY is straightforward.
The difference matters because 2-day shipping competes strongly with going to the store. It is faster to drop everything and go to store than buy something online. Even finding time to go the store in the next 2 days can seem a hassle but in 5 days I can batch the trip with something else and with less pressure it seems fun to having an outing rather than a hassle.
It's a change that makes AMZN go from being the first place you go to shop for something to the last.
Now maybe it is different in urban areas, you really do appreciate the saved time when AMZN zips out three motorcyclists to deliver you three separate packages in one day. If that's what it is Amazon will really have the largest logistics network but the least cost-effective and that's not good for profits.
as mentioned they are bigger than FedEX already.
what will happen when the biggest ecommerce doesn't use FedEX, UPS, USPS anymore?
what will happen when other sellers have trouble getting packages to customers because some delivery zones are dominated by Amazon and they become unprofitable routes for other couriers?
why do you think Amazon launched the Buy with Prime button for third party sites?
It's a global company and I can't speak for every region but what I've seen in some places is that local infrastructure is lacking to the point that it seriously hinders the business. I.e. angry customers that stop ordering stuff because of repeated frustrations with the delivery companies. And even if UPS and FedEx were super reliable in the US (don't know if they are), it would still be risky to fully bet on them without at least controlling some of the market.
FedEx is problematic in my area. Just the other day, they reported that they delivered a package at my door, when they didn't. Because they reported it as delivered, the $100 I spent is just lost money.
I try hard to avoid having FedEx ship anything to me because this isn't the first time this has happened.
UPS, FedEx and the US Postal Service are highly reliable in the US. They used to get their trucks stuck in our driveway (nothing a farmer with a floor jack can't fix) but now they leave packages at the end of our driveway and we bring them in, which keeps the service reliable for the rest of our route.
The USPS used to be faster to send letters. What I miss most of all is that there used to be a slot in our town's post office for letters to the nearest city that would go directly there for cost-effective overnight delivery. I liked getting a letter to my bank, or the county clerk that way. Now they send all the mail to Rochester where it is photographed by some machine which provides better tracking but worse speed.
And in India, well, there it is either your own capacity or none at all.
As for the scamazon marketplace, that's a clear and present danger. Amazon's real strength relative to the Best Buys of the world is that is the "everything store" with a huge selection. The dark side of it is that the marketplace is much less trustworthy than most others (I'm sure there is some dark web site that sells drugs for Monero that is worse.)
I have corresponded w/ AMZN about product listings that are completely nonsensical, like they were written by GPT-0, and been told that they didn't want to hear any complaints about a listing unless I'd bought the item and been ripped off.
Now I like shopping, I like reading about products. I don't like sifting through word salad to find product listings. And the fact that AMZN just doesn't care (they say so!) is one more reason why it is the last place I shop for things instead of the first.
Contrast that to Ebay or Craiglist where the listings make sense (even if some people struggle to spell words like "cat" and "pig") and the sellers are overwhelmingly honest whether they are from the town next door or the far reaches of the "global village".
On this point I'd believe that Amazon understands better than any outsider whether it is worth it to build their own delivery network.