Bottom line: Amazon's one-day Prime shipping will fit right into a society that is increasingly driven by instant gratification. It's going to put increased pressure on other e-commerce outfits and push local retailers one step closer to irrelevance.
Amazon's free two-day shipping perk for Prime members revolutionized e-commerce. Online shopping had been around for years but the major drawbacks for consumers were shipping costs and transit times. Unless you wanted to pay a small fortune, you often had to wait a week or longer for delivery.
Prime's free two-day shipping effectively eliminated those shortcomings, allowing customers to predict when items would arrive and forcing the competition to step their games up.
With its latest initiative, Amazon is poised to once again shake up commerce with Prime one-day shipping.
Amazon has offered free one-day and same-day shipping to select customers in the past although the perk was limited to orders over $35. The new one-day shipping service, slowly rolling out now to customers across the country, does away with the minimum order requirement. Soon, all Prime members will be able to select from Amazon's more than 100 million item inventory and have it show up at their doorstep (or in their car trunks) the very next day.
As Michael Krakaris, founder of e-commerce fulfillment company Deliverr, notes, Amazon has the potential to once again revolutionize commerce. "The way they're now going to think about it is... should I go to the Walgreens down the street? Or should I just buy it on Amazon?"