Amazon is advertising shipping services to sellers in the UK, offering premium shipping services at competitive prices. “Amazon Shipping will pick up your parcels 7 days a week, and deliver them to your customers,” it states on its UK Amazon Shipping website.
What makes this newsworthy is the fact it’s not restricting orders to Amazon orders. “Ship orders from your own website and other channels, starting from 20 parcels a day,” it states.
Amazon Shipping promises UK merchants competitive rates – and importantly, it says it does not charge extra fees for residential delivery, peak fees, or to deliver on weekends.
CNBC had written about Amazon’s shipping service in the US back in November 2018, where it reported the company was offering significant discounts to early testers. “Although Amazon has long played down its shipping ambitions – saying its own delivery service is only meant to “supplement” existing partners – the aggressive pricing could be an indication of its plan going far beyond that,” CNBC had reported at the time.
But relying on a shipping carrier that is also a shipper itself can pose issues. In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon was suspending the shipping service in the US – citing sources that the decision was due to the surge in its own customers’ orders in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
On the other hand, merchants benefit from increased competition – existing shipping carriers UPS and FedEx have upped their game when it comes to serving online sellers.
An Amazon executive in the UK announce the new Amazon Shipping service in a post on LinkedIn two days ago.
Interestingly Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos recently invested in a company called Beacon that “wants to disrupt the global shipping industry by using A.I. to find the cheapest shipping routes while offering customers supply chain financing to help cashflow,” according to CNBC, which noted the investment was a personal one by Bezos and not made by Amazon itself.
