Amazon To Help Launch Small Business Delivery Services

Anyone who has ever wanted to personally ensure Amazon packages get to their customers quickly and has $10,000 lying around just got great news from the e-commerce corporation. Amazon just announced its Delivery Service Partners program, which will help “entrepreneurs” start small delivery services of their own while partnering with Jeff Bezos’s tech giant.

Amazon outlined the program in a press release on Thursday. The idea is that someone can work with Amazon to start their own independent delivery service, with access to Amazon’s delivery infrastructure and guaranteed work, given the high volume of deliveries Amazon makes every day.

According to Amazon, startup costs are “as low as $10,000,” with discounts given on things like Amazon-branded uniforms and vehicles. To begin with, a business needs to have at least five delivery vans, but that number can ramp up over time. Despite their affiliation and branding, these entrepreneurs and drivers will not actually work for Amazon, according to CNN.

Prior to this development, most Amazon deliveries were carried out by third-party carriers like FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service. Amazon makes sure packages get to distribution centers in each city, but those other carriers bring the goods between those centers and customers’ doorsteps.

The Delivery Service Partners program gives Amazon more control over the last step of the delivery process. President Donald Trump accused Amazon of giving the Postal Service a raw deal earlier this year, CNN pointed out. Amazon also currently lets individual drivers use their personal vehicles for deliveries through its “Flex” program, which has been criticized recently.

Delivery partners under this program will be required to give their employees paid time off and benefits, according to CNN.

Amazon’s shipping costs were as high as $21 billion in 2017, according to CNBC. This measure could theoretically help Amazon control those costs by working with small businesses that rely on, but do not directly work for, Amazon. According to the tech behemoth, these delivery partners can accrue up to $300,000 in annual profit.

“Customer demand is higher than ever and we have a need to build more capacity,” Amazon’s senior VP of worldwide operations said in a statement. “As we evaluated how to support our growth, we went back to our roots to share the opportunity with small-and-medium-sized businesses.”