Doug Herrington: 3 ways Amazon is working to deliver faster in 2024

One thing we’ve learned about customers over the years is the importance they place on delivery speed. The faster we can get products to customers, the more likely they are to buy them.

To that end, we reached an important delivery speed milestone in 2023: Amazon delivered to Prime members at the fastest speeds ever globally, with more than 7 billion units arriving the same or next day, including more than 4 billion in the U.S. and more than 2 billion in Europe.

This is a massive accomplishment, and I want to thank the Amazon employees and partners who continue to rethink and reinvent how we get packages to customers.

Fastest speeds ever in 2023

We achieved our fastest-ever global shipping speeds last year by focusing on a few key initiatives—shortening the distance our deliveries had to travel to reach customers, improving our inventory placement, and building out our Same-Day Delivery service.

In the U.S., for example, we regionalized our operations and transportation networks across the country, dividing them into smaller, easier-to-serve regions. That allowed us to better leverage the in-region inventory for customers and ship nearly 600 million more items from in-region fulfillment centers year over year in the fourth quarter of 2023. Shipping from in-region fulfillment centers to our delivery stations also helped reduce the stops per package and decrease our reliance on air transportation. In Europe, we shortened the average distance each package traveled within our middle mile network by 25 kilometers in 2023 compared to 2022.

We focused on inventory placement around the world and worked to stock more of the products our customers want locally, and we expanded our capacity to place these products in the right fulfillment centers in each respective region. This allows us to maintain the broadest selection of products available and enhances our ability to fulfill a customer’s entire order at one time from the Amazon location closest to them.

And we continued to invest in our Same-Day Delivery service, adding nine new dedicated sites and serving 18 additional U.S. cities over the course of the year. We shared our plans last year to double the number of sites in the coming years and currently operate more than 55 dedicated Same-Day sites across the U.S. These smaller sites are hybrid—part fulfillment center, part delivery station. They allow us to fulfill, sort, and deliver products all from one site so we can get products out to our customers even quicker. In the fourth quarter of 2023, we increased the number of items delivered the same day or overnight in the U.S. by more than 65% year over year. In the UK, more than 70% of Prime member orders arrived the same or next day in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Even faster delivery speeds in 2024

After reaching our fastest delivery speeds ever in 2023, we’re working to get even faster in 2024. We’re continuing to reimagine our operations network, harnessing the power of AI to place even more items in just the right places to anticipate and meet customer demand. We also plan to further expand our Same-Day Delivery service to reach more customers. Delivering packages faster isn’t a matter of moving faster within our facilities—it’s being smarter about our structure and product placement. We’ll continue to make our workplaces safer, even as we get faster. Our recordable incident rate continues to improve year over year and is down double-digit percentages since 2019.

Here’s a bit more detail about how we’re working toward making 2024 our fastest year ever:

1. Shipping more products from locations closer to customers

We’ll continue to optimize our operations network with the goal of shipping more products from locations closer to customers, helping to not only speed up deliveries, but also reduce the travel distance and stops per package. In the U.S., we’ll refine our regionalization model, making sure each region is the right size, efficient, and operating smoothly. This will require tweaks and adjustments over time, especially as our fulfillment network and delivery options grow.

Last year, we also introduced a robotics storage system called Sequoia to a fulfillment center in Houston, Texas. Sequoia allows Amazon to identify and store inventory up to 75% faster and, when integrated with other technologies, will reduce order process time by up to 25%. The system also supports employee safety by collecting inventory into totes and bringing the totes to newly designed ergonomic workstations, reducing how often employees have to reach or squat down to pick customer orders. We look forward to rolling out this robotics storage system at more facilities in 2024.

Sequoia reimagines how we store and manage inventory at our sites.

Around the world, we’re working to make sure more of the products our customers want are stocked locally and in the right buildings within each region. With the help of AI, we’re able to expand the selection of products that we keep as close as possible to customers, stocking more everyday essentials that our customers order and re-order consistently (think paper towels and dog food). This means more customers can get the items they want most frequently even faster.

As part of this, we’re evolving how products come into our fulfillment centers from vendors and our selling partners. In 2023, we spent a lot of time making sure the products that leave our buildings get out faster and more efficiently. This year, we’re making sure the same is true for the products coming in. The goal is for our operations teams to have a better sense of what inventory—and how much of it—is coming in, which will allow them to align that inventory to what customers in that particular region want and need, helping to make our whole process more efficient.

2. Growing our Same-Day Delivery service globally

Amazon now offers Same-Day Delivery in more than 110 U.S. metro areas, from San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta to Cedar Rapids, Daytona Beach, and Baton Rouge, and in more than 135 cities and towns across Europe, from London, Paris, and Berlin to Glasgow, Lille and Bremen. This year, we also plan to add sites across a variety of U.S. metro areas, and, around the world, we aim to offer more products customers want and need the same or next day.

We know these fast-turn deliveries are important for customers. The last Same-Day Delivery order on Christmas Eve was placed at 5:00 p.m. PT in Orange County, California—for a toddler’s counting and color-sorting set—and it was delivered less than three hours later, at 7:35 p.m. PT.

In December, we also celebrated the delivery of our billionth package from a Same-Day site in the U.S.—wireless noise-cancelling earbuds for a customer in Mahwah, New Jersey.

For services like Amazon Pharmacy (for which I’m an active and happy customer) we have Same-Day Delivery available in Seattle, Austin, Indianapolis, Miami, and Phoenix.

3. Expanding our delivery network to reach more geographies

We’re always innovating to reach customers where they are, regardless of location. That includes expanding our Amazon logistics delivery network to reach more rural customers, and tailoring our delivery modes in more densely populated areas to include bikes, walkers, and deliveries from local businesses such as bodegas.

We’ve also made exciting progress on our Prime Air drone delivery program: At our facility in College Station, Texas, our fastest click-to-delivery time in the fourth quarter of 2023 was 15 minutes and 29 seconds, for a box of Annie’s Cocoa and Vanilla Bunny Cookies. This year, we’re looking forward to expanding Prime Air to the UK, Italy, and a new U.S. location.

Many years ago, I remember Jeff Bezos talking about the difference between a leader and a caretaker. Put simply, he said, a leader is going to keep pushing to make something better, instead of maintaining the status quo. A leader is going to try new, innovative ideas, even though they’re challenging or time consuming or seem confusing at first. This is very much how I think about what we’re doing right now with speed. We’re immensely proud of our progress so far, but we aren’t satisfied and know there’s more we can do. Our work on delivery speeds is global, multi-year effort, and we know has massive runway for us to continue delivering ever faster for customers.