Report: Amazon to roll out free same-day delivery for its Amazon Prime members

A Wall Street Journal report published yesterday said that e-commerce behemoth Amazon will offer free same-day delivery for its Amazon Prime members.

According to the report, this option will be made available in 14 metropolitan locales in the United States and will not come with an extra fee for Amazon Prime members. An annual Amazon Prime membership costs $99. And Amazon Prime members that want same say delivery will not be required to pay the $5.99 per-order fee for goods purchased by noon as long as the order is for a minimum of $35, followed with a company pledge to get orders delivered to customers by 9 pm, WSJ said.

This development comes at a time, the article said, that various startup players, including Uber, Lyft, Deliv, and Postmates, among others, are working on various forms of low-cost or free same-day delivery through their network of on-call workers, which could pose a challenge to Amazon from brick and mortar stores in close proximity to customers, too.

“Amazon continues to stretch the envelope,” said Jerry Hempstead, president of Hempstead Consulting in Orlando. “They are bent on reducing the time from your click buying their product until you are gratified. My mind swims on how much inventory they have to deploy at the local level to make this service a reality and obviously there are local delivery service providers willing to transport at a price point that does not consume all the argon Amazon might have on the order. Other retailers have to be just shaking their heads in frustration that Amazon keeps raising the bar.”

As previously reported, the impact of e-commerce on shipping and consumer shopping habits cannot be understated.

“It is no surprise the biggest driver of change in our industry is e-commerce; it is bringing unparalleled and unprecedented growth and a landscape of continuing change,” said Henry Maier, President and CEO of FedEx Ground at last month’s NASSTRAC conference.

Maier noted that e-commerce can now be viewed as a revolutionary shift in our society, akin to how airplanes were decades ago. And he explained how in the United States alone, in 2015, e-commerce will top $300 billion in sales and is fast outpacing brick and mortar store rollouts, which, from 2012-2014, increased by more than 100 percent, whereas during that same period the number of “Web,” or e-commerce-type stores shot up by 1,354 percent.