Author: Cameron Summerson / Source: How-To Geek
One of the most significant benefits of Amazon Prime has long been the free two-day shipping on almost everything. But that time may be coming to an end—Amazon is talking about transitioning to free one-day shipping. Oh yeah.
In a call to investors yesterday, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company is working on setting the Prime shipping default to one-day.
He said that they have been “working on evolving the Prime shipping program” with one-day shipping, going on to say that they’ll “be building most of this capacity through the year in 2019.”The word on the street is that Amazon will spend upwards of $800 million for the required infrastructure changes to make the change happen. They’ll also be expanding partnerships with USPS, UPS, and FedEx—alongside its own delivery service, of course—to make the one-day dream a reality.
While it’s probably unlikely we’ll see one-day shipping hit all items before the end of 2019, Amazon is already making moves to get this shindig started earlier. For example, it dropped the $35 minimum for the current one-day shipping option and expanded eligible zip codes just last month. So the plan is already in motion.
This is a smart move from Amazon, because many competing retailers, like Wal-Mart and Target, are now offering free two-day shipping on most items. This makes buying from Amazon less compelling to users, especially when you consider the fact that you don’t have to shell out $120 a year to the other guys to leverage the two-day option. Moving to one-day shipping will once again give Amazon the shipping advantage.
The big question, however, is one that hasn’t yet been addressed: will this raise Prime membership costs? If I were a betting man, I’d put a healthy sum on “yeah, probably”—even if an increase doesn’t happen immediately, it’s inevitably going to happen.
In other news, people aren’t upgrading smartphones as often, Disney looks to take control of Hulu, Walmart opened the “store of the future,” and a lot more. Let’s talk about it.
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