Amazon is on a spending spree to grow its shipping business and compete with FedEx and UPS. It's increased capacity of its in-house logistics
network by 50% year-over-year, using all that growth to get into the big business of third-party shipping. That's right, Amazon may be the carrier
delivering to your door even when you didn't order on the world's biggest e-commerce site.
They want to be a new kind of U.S. Postal Service where everything can get everywhere, but also quickly.
In 2014, Amazon started building its global transportation network from scratch. Seven years and 10 billion deliveries later, Amazon now has
400,000 drivers worldwide, 40,000 semitrucks, 30,000 vans and a fleet of 70+ planes operating out of its very own air hub that just opened in
Northern Kentucky in August.
I don't think anybody in the industry would be surprised if this enormous capacity that Amazon has built out, if they use that to, you know, offer
shipping service that would compete directly with somebody like UPS or FedEx.
Although Amazon still depends on UPS and the Postal Service for more than a quarter of its deliveries, analysts say this reliance is shrinking.
Instead, Amazon is competing with them, already offering shipping services for non-Amazon orders in the U.K.
Eventually they were going to offer it to someone else. That's just how the system works. Amazon's usually more efficient than anyone else. Amazon's
usually focusing on the right numbers, and so they're usually able to get cheaper than everyone else, too.
CNBC headed to an online merchant conference in Las Vegas to talk to former Amazon employees and current sellers about how third-party shipping is
likely to be the behemoth's next big venture.
Back in 1994, when it was just a website selling books, Amazon says Jeff Bezos hand-delivered the first customer packages to a Seattle post office
himself. As business grew, it relied on UPS, the Postal Service and to a lesser degree FedEx for shipping.
In the old days, Amazon worked with FedEx, UPS, they needed help delivering packages, right, as quickly as possible. And they didn't want to disappoint
Prime members. Nowadays, Amazon has way more planes than they used to. They've got vans in every neighborhood.
Now Amazon's got 300 million customers in 200+ countries. Former Amazon Product Safety Program Manager Rachel Greer says by 2011 online shopping
volume was overwhelming even the most established nationwide shippers.
It turned out that UPS couldn't handle the volume. So at that point, our VP was saying we can't handle this, we can't have this happen. Amazon cannot
be hamstrung in our growth by a third-party service provider. We have to solve this ourselves.
By 2014, Amazon says it wanted better control. So it started developing a global transportation network from scratch to ensure consistent and
reliable delivery.
It really hasn't taken them that long to build that capability. It's a great moat around their business, right? Building a logistics network is a
really hard thing to do. And other companies, you know, won't be able to easily follow in their footsteps relative to that.
In 2019, Amazon was delivering less than 47% of its own packages. Now in 2021, that number has soared to 72%. Similar growth has happened with
warehouses. In 2018, 51% of the U.S. population lived within an hour of an Amazon warehouse. Now that's up to 77%. To get there, Amazon's Q1 capital
expenditures, which includes logistics expansion grew by a whopping 80% over the previous year.
I don't think they had a choice. They knew that it was going to be a challenge for UPS and FedEx to do the kind of investment required in order
to meet that standard for their customers.
In 2019, Amazon changed the game when it made one-day shipping the norm. That same year, FedEx announced it would not renew its partnership with
Amazon. But Amazon still depends on UPS and the Postal Service. At least for now.
USPS delivers to every zip code every small town in America, and Amazon built its strategy around taking away the high-volume centers.
According to one investigation, Amazon has already begun quietly transporting cargo on its planes for the Postal Service. USPS isn't exactly
known right now for being on time or efficient. So it may be that Amazon's the better option in those cases. And in May last year, Amazon launched a
logistics-as-a-service program in the U.K. Researchers from DePaul University predict something similar will launch here in the U.S. in the
next 18 months. While Morgan Stanley predicted it could happen this year. Analysts say Amazon will likely focus on shipping from retailers directly
to consumers rather than trying to replicate the vast array of services offered by FedEx and UPS
Well they're not going to be just this blanket carrier that will deliver whatever package that you want them to, to whatever address. Amazon is sort
of cherry-picking the routes they want to run and sort of the parcel sizes they want to deliver.
Like all carriers, Amazon experienced significant shipping delays during the pandemic. Yet the number of Prime members continued to soar, reaching
200 million in 2020. And as the number of customers grew, so too did Amazon's spend on logistics. Perhaps the biggest investment so far is the
new $1.5 billion Amazon air hub in Kentucky.
Planes were always part of the plan because, you know, if you're trying to do two-day delivery, there's just certain things you got to use planes for.
Amazon launched its air cargo division in 2016, contracting with several carriers to fly packages closer to Amazon's sprawling system of 185+ global
warehouses. The Kentucky hub has been in development for four+ years, with Bezos attending the groundbreaking in 2019.
It's going to let us get packages to customers faster. And that's a big deal.
The new 600-acre Amazon hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport includes an 800,000-square-foot robotic sort center.
A smaller 20,000-square-foot Amazon air hub opened in Germany last November. But as early as 2018, analysts were calling Amazon Air a
competitive risk to UPS and FedEx. By 2019, it had 50 planes. But it also faced the risk of pilot strikes, with one union saying Amazon paid pilots
33% less than they got paid to fly similar cargo planes for UPS and FedEx.
I don't believe that consumers will ever go backwards from where we are. But that doesn't mean it has to put this kind of pressure on the system.
It's going to take a lot of coordination between the big companies, Amazons of the world, and our contractors to build a system that's both fair,
equitable and sustainable.
After six+ years of labor negotiations, many Amazon pilots now have a new contract with improved pay rates and work rules. Amazon now says it leases
or owns more than 70 aircraft that fly to 35+ destinations in the U.S. and Europe. In comparison, FedEx operates a fleet of 680 aircraft and UPS has
576. At 70+ planes, Amazon's reach is still smaller, but its rapid growth sets it apart. DePaul researchers found Amazon has expanded from 122 daily
flights in August 2020 to 140 in February 2021. Predicting Amazon will have 200 planes by 2028. An earlier key to faster delivery was Amazon's big
investment in the most expensive part of the shipping process: getting a package that last mile to your door. Some of this is done by Amazon Flex
drivers, individual gig workers who make between $18 and $25 an hour driving routes on demand. Another 115,000 Amazon drivers work for Delivery
Service Partners, or DSPs, small independent companies that contract exclusively with Amazon. The DSP program started in 2018, with Amazon
offering $10,000 to incentivize current Amazon employees, veterans, Black, Latinx and Native American entrepreneurs to launch a DSP. There's now more
than 2,000 DSPs in the U.S.
Ultimately, it's a very low cost structure compared to the competitors. And so if you're a seller, and you don't have a personal issue with some of the
stories that are coming out, which are growing in number, unfortunately, then it's a real cost advantage for you.
But DSP drivers have voiced big concerns lately, from cameras recording inside vans at all times, to running stop signs and urinating in bottles to
keep up the pace.
Which is definitely disgusting, you know, getting into the vans the next day and seeing somebody's pee bottle sitting behind the seat, or sitting in
the cupholders.
Regardless, Amazon's army of drivers and branded vehicles is only growing. It purchased 100,000 electric vans from Rivian in 2019. They're being
tested in 16 cities now, with 10,000 of them scheduled to hit the road next year.
I think there are some growing pains there. But once they sort out some of those issues, it'll be more attractive as a side hustle for people the same
way Instacart was or Uber driving is.
For its growing number of international shipments, Amazon uses ocean liners, especially between China and the U.S. For domestic cross-country
shipments, Amazon has 40,000 Prime-branded semitruck trailers, and it's got powerful algorithms that know when one of those trucks won't be full.
Very few companies are filling in an entire 53-foot truck to ship somewhere. If you've got all these trucks running around and they're only
operating at 20-30% capacity, Amazon's smart enough to know hey, we should be filling these trucks up any way we can to maximize, you know, the
capital that we've invested in these things.
Keith Gregory's vitamin and supplement company is based in a 3,500-person town in Oregon. It does about $4 million of annual sales on Amazon.
They've reached out to us very aggressively trying to get us to work with them for our shipping arrangements, but not just for our own branded
products. They're interested in LTL and freight for our other segments of our business as well: the the pieces that UPS and FedEx are currently
handling for us.
The Amazon Freight program lets sellers like Gregory take advantage of LTL, less than load truck space, at discounted rates, while allowing Amazon to
make money on otherwise wasted space. Gregory just started using the program and says Amazon charges up to $17,00 less than FedEx or UPS Freight
for some of his routes from Oregon to Southern California.
They certainly seem to want to own the market. And, you know, for us being in a rural community, the fact that somebody is willing to cater to us and
they're willing to accommodate pickup schedules and not just say, okay, we'll be there every day at 3:30 is also very attractive to us. Not just
the rate piece, but the fact that they're also willing to, you know, use their vast fleet of vehicles to help us with our logistics as well, which
UPS and FedEx are not cooperative in that sense with us.
Amazon has this odd imbalance where they have an enormous amount of goods going inbound to Amazon warehouses, but then very often those trucks are
leaving empty going other places. Again, a kind of a classic Amazon thing to do: by taking that internal service and then making it available to
anyone to use externally, they're able to, you know, now have more revenue.
Many Amazon sellers like Bernie Thompson, pay to use a service called Fulfilled by Amazon, or FBA, where sellers store inventory in an Amazon
warehouse and rely on Amazon to pack and ship out customer orders. Amazon also offers FBA service for orders not made on Amazon.com.
There were points in time in our company's existence where really Amazon shipped 100% of our orders for all channels, not just an Amazon, but also
on eBay, Newegg, Walmart, Google.
Amazon calls this multi-channel fulfillment. Thompson uses it for many of the 120+ consumer electronic products he sells from his warehouse outside
Seattle.
So if you go today and buy a Plugable product on eBay, it's actually going to be coming from an Amazon warehouse and very often delivered by an Amazon
delivery service.
This explains why some orders from eBay or Walmart and others arrive at your door in Amazon packaging. Although Amazon has tried to solve this with
varying success,
Amazon's had on-off programs over the years to fulfill items from the warehouse but have it be in packaging that was not Amazon marked. They've
never really succeeded at that. Like, we were part of that program, and then we found out that yea, the boxes were blank, but they were using this
super colorful Amazon marketing Christmas tape. You know, and these were being used for Walmart orders.
I think the killer feature will be when Amazon is able to do merchant-branded fulfillment. They might be able to slap on or inkjet on
branded aspects to that fulfillment package so that a customer doesn't understand that this box is being delivered by Amazon and that it's in the
brand of the merchant.
So why does Amazon want to take on the expensive behind-the-scenes job of shipping non-Amazon orders? It may in fact help Amazon hold on to its
reputation for the lowest prices online.
It might cost me say $3.30 to send an envelope type of product across the country for an Amazon order. That same order, when it's not an Amazon
order, let's say an eBay order, might be $5.70 or something like that. And so that causes an effect where brands like us, on a $10 product or a $30
product, you will almost always find the Amazon price lower than the eBay price.
If they can double, even add 30% more revenue and capacity because they're delivering not just for Amazon customers but for, frankly, the entire
internet, it does help them get more scale, more costs benefits, especially as you move into more remote areas where they just don't have as much
Amazon customer volume.
There was in fact already a program called Amazon Shipping being tested in several U.S. cities last year, until it was shut down at the beginning of
the pandemic. Amazon drivers would pick up packages from businesses and deliver them to consumers without ever setting foot in a warehouse.
You'll see this start off in a couple of markets. And you know, they'll tweak it and they'll sort of take some learnings away from those initial
markets and then they'll expand the program more broadly.
And if you look at all of the third-party services that they opened up to sellers over the years, including AWS, they've had to become the best in
the business to service their own. And by bringing in additional revenue streams to help support scale, ultimately brings down cost, creates more of
a situation where they can gain more market share, more market power, and they are addicted to growth.
Indeed, Amazon's current shipping expansion is reminiscent of other times it's used immense resources and data to disrupt an industry. Think Prime
Video and Amazon Web Services.
I was part of the process for making sure that FBA sellers were compliant more than a decade ago. And they were like, well, we have excess capacity.
Let's use it. And then when AWS started, we have excess capacity. Let's use it. So of course, if Amazon develops a platform, it works well, and of
course it's going to be excess capacity, they're going to try to sell it to someone. And Amazon has learned much from its more established shipping
partners about how to keep costs down. For example, it still primarily outsources costly rural deliveries to USPS and outsources the expensive
last-mile portion to those small delivery service partner contractors.
What Amazon is able to do right now is sort of pick off probably the most attractive routes, the most attractive packages, and deliver like to the
most densely populated areas.
On the extreme end, some think there's a chance Amazon will try to buy other shippers outright.
Down the road, I think Amazon will be so big, so powerful and so wealthy, they will simply absorb UPS.
But one thing is certain. Amazon says it's continuing to spend on logistics, figuring out how to keep climbing to the top of e-commerce and
beyond.
Amazon is a company that will unabashedly compete with everyone. They will compete with their customers, they will compete with their partners, and
they will compete with themselves. And it's not a bad thing. It's just that's part of the secret to Amazon's success.