Last-Mile Innovation

Drone delivery companies are inking new partnerships, clearing regulatory hurdles and reaching more customers as part of a push for long-term adoption of the emerging transportation method.

In the last-mile delivery space, drones offer a speedy, short-distance transit option for light payloads such as prescriptions, groceries or convenience items. While they aren't filling the skies just yet, industry players are strengthening their capabilities and scaling their networks quickly.

That momentum doesn't appear to be slowing down this year, with announcements from Zipline, DroneUp, Wing and Skyports Drone Services demonstrating drones' growing presence in supply chains. Here are five notable developments in the drone delivery and logistics world in 2024 so far.

1. Walmart expanding Texas drone delivery coverage

Walmart kicked off the year with an announcement to expand its drone delivery services to 1.8 million more homes in Texas' Dallas-Fort Worth area. Drones from Zipline and Wing will deliver orders for the new batch of eligible customers.

"Our drone delivery expansion includes stores across more than 30 towns and municipalities in the DFW metroplex, marking the first time a U.S. retailer has offered drone delivery to this many households in a single market," Walmart said in its announcement.

Prior to the expansion, Walmart had already been making drone deliveries in the area with DroneUp and Wing. The retail giant said recent Federal Aviation Administration exemptions granted for Wing and Zipline helped unlock further expansion in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

2. DroneUp lands key FAA exemption to scale deliveries

DroneUp is now also able to conduct delivery operations beyond the direct visual line of sight of the pilot after receiving an exemption from the FAA.

The drone delivery company said in a Jan. 18 news release that it could immediately commence those operations at the facilities of Virginia's Riverside Health System, with the path paved for a broader rollout at more locations in the future.

DroneUp joins a growing roster of companies that are able to conduct deliveries in the U.S. beyond the visual line of sight, including UPS Flight Forward and Zipline, enabling them to ramp up their delivery activity and improve economies of scale.

"This breakthrough enhances operational capabilities and presents a substantial cost reduction in the last-mile delivery process," DroneUp said. "By reducing the necessary human resources, DroneUp can now accelerate safe and large-scale deployment of autonomous last-mile drone deliveries."

3. Zipline partners with Pennsylvania health system

Zipline's drones will deliver prescriptions to homes and transport samples and products between facilities in a new partnership with Pennsylvania-based health system WellSpan Health. The partnership will use Zipline's "Platform 2" service, which leverages a drone-droid combo to precisely deliver a payload.

"Over the coming years, WellSpan Health will integrate Zipline’s service within select facilities and will share more details about how patients can sign up to use the service when it becomes operational," according to the Feb. 20 announcement.

The partnership marks an expansion of Zipline's presence in the U.S. healthcare delivery space, as the company has already secured delivery programs with hospital systems like Cleveland Clinic and Michigan Medicine.

4. Drones' middle-mile upside examined in New York, New Jersey

Drones' role in logistics isn't limited to last-mile delivery. Skyports Drone Services is partnering with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to explore the potential of middle-mile drone logistics at the ports, airports and transportation assets the authority oversees, according to a Feb. 21 news release.

PANYNJ ultimately wants to reallocate a portion of cross-Hudson River freight movements to greener modes of transportation like electric drones.

The multi-year collaboration will initially focus on how drones can support the authority's aim to reduce truck traffic of its bridges and tunnels. To start, the parties will launch a feasibility study to identify regulatory, technical, operational and commercial pathways for enabling drone services across the Port District.

“It may seem like something from the Jetsons, but if drone cargo proves viable it may be a low-carbon way to move the most valuable items between New York and New Jersey,” said Seth Wainer, innovation program director at PANYNJ, in the news release. “We are exploring routes and starting to look for customers who may be interested in investing in this space alongside us.”

5. Wing, DoorDash link up for Wendy's deliveries

DoorDash and Wing launched a drone delivery partnership in Christiansburg, Virginia, according to a news release. Customers with an eligible address can use DoorDash's app to have a qualifying order from the town’s Wendy's restaurant at 2355 N. Franklin St. be delivered via drone.

Wing has familiarity with Christiansburg already, partnering with FedEx and Walgreens for commercial drone deliveries in the area via a program launched in 2019. Wing and DoorDash plan to expand their collaboration into other U.S. cities later this year.

The two companies have already been working together in Australia, serving three Queensland locations with more than 60 participating merchants under a program launched in 2022.

“Expanding our partnership with DoorDash and launching in the U.S. is a direct result of the success we’ve seen from our initial collaboration in Australia, where Wing has served tens of thousands of customers via the DoorDash app for over a year now,” said Cosimo Leipold, Wing's global head of partnerships and product, in the announcement. “Wing has now made over 350,000 deliveries across three countries and looking ahead we are focused on providing a fast, affordable and safe service to our partners so they can better serve their customers."

After testing drone deliveries for the last few years, Walmart is increasingly rolling out the option as a way to fulfill e-commerce orders.

As of early January, the retailer had 31 hubs for drone delivery across six states, Prathibha Rajashekhar, the retailer’s senior vice president of automation and innovation, stores and supply chain, recently told retail blog Omni Talk, noting that in the Dallas area alone, the retailer had 11 hubs with drone technology firm DroneUp and two with another tech provider in the space, Wing.

On a single Sunday earlier this winter, Walmart saw 130 drone deliveries at one of its hubs, according to Rajashekhar — and the company has completed more than 20,000 drone deliveries over the last two years.

“People talk about drones like they are the future. They are here today,” Rajashekhar told Omni Talk.

In January, Walmart announced it is expanding drone delivery powered by Wing and Zipline to up to 1.8 million additional households, linking the option to stores across more than 30 towns and municipalities in the Dallas-Forth Worth metroplex. Walmart noted that both on-demand drone delivery providers are approved by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly without a dedicated observer overseeing their drones at all times.

This clearance from the FAA, known as Beyond Visual Line of Sight, has become more frequent in the past year, according to The Wall Street Journal, noting that industry experts say regulatory restraints will decrease as communities become more familiar with the technology and delivery method.

The FAA is currently developing rules to make drone delivery “routine, scalable and economically viable,” a spokesperson for the federal agency told the newspaper.

At the end of February, city council members for North Richland Hills and Plano, Texas, approved changes that pave the way for drone delivery from nearby Walmart stores, according to Dronelife.com.

“The way we think about any solution, whether it’s drone or any other solution is ‘How is it solving a customer problem?’ Customers told us that they want some deliveries to happen within less than 30 minutes, so drones solve that,” Rajashekhar said.

Drone deliveries can get items to customers in 30 minutes and sometimes as fast as 10 minutes, according to Walmart. Three-quarters of the 120,000 items in a Walmart supercenter are eligible for drone delivery, Rajashekhar said.

Walmart has said that it’s seen customers use drone deliveries for forgotten ingredients, snacks, beverages, over-the-counter medicines and cravings, like caffeine or sweet treats, noting that drones can even deliver fragile items like eggs. Drones are particularly handy for parents who are running late or traveling and need to order a microwaveable dinner for their children, Rajashekhar said.

Food is a key ingredient for drone delivery demand. When Wing unveiled in January a new aircraft in its drone fleet, the company noted that the new option would better handle larger orders for items like dinner ingredients such as pasta, marinara sauce, parmesan cheese, canned olives and garlic. Wing’s new aircraft can carry a payload of up to 5 pounds — nearly double the roughly 2.5-pound payload its existing ones handle.

Wing noted that in its first four months of service with Walmart, which started last August, it saw an “overwhelmingly positive” customer response with people using the service for quick meals, groceries, household essentials and over-the-counter medicines.

As more drone delivery hubs go live, customers in the eligible delivery radius will see drone delivery as an e-commerce fulfillment option, Rajashekhar said. Walmart is working to integrate drone delivery options into the retailer’s app so customers don’t have to place drone delivery orders from the drone partners’ websites, she added.

Walmart’s emphasis on drones comes at a time when competitor Amazon has ramped up its own drone deliveries. Amazon announced last fall that it will integrate Prime Air drones into its fulfillment network for faster delivery by deploying them at some same-day delivery sites.

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By Veho

Last mile delivery is the most critical — and most expensive — part of the shipping process. It’s also vital to customer satisfaction and key to delivering strategic and financial impact. 

From building a better, more enjoyable customer experience that enables future growth to addressing operational challenges and improving efficiencies for bottom-line success, the last mile is rife with lucrative opportunities for shippers to lower costs and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).

“Often, the customer believes that if a delivery goes wrong, it’s likely the brand's fault,” said Rob Bernton, Senior Director of Client Success at Veho. “Brands that offer a better delivery experience will be better positioned to win market share going forward.”

By revamping last mile delivery and return strategies to give customers what they want, companies can turn pain points into differentiators, improve brand perception and loyalty, and make better use of their budgets.

According to a recent report from Veho and Incisiv, 92% of respondents agree that optimizing last mile delivery leads to significant operational cost savings — and they’re not wrong. Companies have already started turning to the last mile for improvement opportunities, and it’s paying off.

Optimizing last mile delivery for cost and performance

“When we first began working with an organic meal kit company, we were able to improve their on-time delivery (OTD) from 92% to 99%,” Bernton said. “This translated to a 40% reduction in delivery errors, a 61% reduction in total credit and refund costs and a 71% reduction in cost of refunds related to delivery issues. On the whole, we have seen countless times where clients are able to lower their customer support calls and their refunds or credits on orders, and they have been able to reduce their client churn.”

Getting a delivery wrong is costly — both immediately and in the long term — and may be as detrimental to the customer relationship as it is to your bottom line. Unhappy customers due to failed deliveries lead to inflated ancillary costs, such as increased customer calls, redelivery costs or replacement costs.

“Misplaced packages increase the likelihood of requests for refunds and reorders, and they ultimately lower customer lifetime value,” Bernton explained. “This has tremendous long-term impact on a brand’s growth and even has the potential to impact company valuation if the issue escalates.”

Enhancing your brand with customer-centric deliveries

Engaging a last mile expert with middle-mile and first-mile capabilities allows you to scale your business, streamline deliveries and meet sudden surge spikes. 

“At Veho, we continue to grow our coverage and density within the markets we operate, which allows our network to have greater density and lower cost. When you add our unique marketplace model that scales up and down based on seasonal demand and our consistently high OTD (on-time delivery) performance, we are continuously working to lower the total costs to our clients,” Bernton said.

By giving customers more control throughout the delivery process, businesses drive higher customer satisfaction and improve profitability. According to the INCISIV report, 80% of respondents believe a better delivery experience improves repurchase rates and brand loyalty. The report also estimates that last mile delivery has enabled, on average: 

• An 8.9% improvement in e-commerce conversion rates.
• A 10.6% increase in average order values (AOV).
• An 8.9% decrease in customer churn rate. 
• A 15.3% boost in Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Reduce costs while delighting consumers

Bernton said, “Anything the brand can do to capture better delivery instructions from the customer — such as access codes, drop-off location information (especially in apartments), and times that don’t work for drop off — these will significantly reduce delivery costs for the brand.”

For example, consider Veho’s new Perfect Placement feature. By enabling customers to upload or text a photo of their preferred placement, along with any additional delivery instructions, the new feature eliminates guesswork and ensures drivers know precisely where to leave packages, stopping potential issues before they happen.

Once the package is placed in the specified location, customers receive a confirmation, complete with a photo of the placed package, ensuring peace of mind. However, if a package is delayed, Veho can keep customers apprised via text or within the Veho app, a capability that has led to an average 4.9 customer satisfaction score improvement for luxury apparel brand clients.

Its customer-centric innovation hasn’t stopped there.

“We are working to launch our geo-coded pins to show our drivers exactly where to drop off a package,” Bernton shared. “We are also working on better address verification technology and real-time nudges that alert drivers when they are in the wrong location when dropping off a package. All of these will help our partners realize delivery savings.”

The last mile is especially high stakes, so getting it right is crucial. By meeting customer expectations, brands can enhance their reputation, decrease the cost associated with unhappy customers and safeguard their growth — all while fostering stronger customer relationships built on trust.

Connect with Veho to learn more about how your organization can build a better delivery experience.

Will delivery robots take over sidewalks 10 years from now?

While early tests of sidewalk delivery bots fizzled out at major companies like Amazon and FedEx, industry insiders have high hopes for the tech. Still, manufacturers have taken a measured approach to growth in the U.S. amid a tighter funding environment and regulatory complexities, and many are split on best use cases for the bots.

To better understand how sidewalk bots will fit into the last-mile delivery puzzle, we asked four experts for their takes on what U.S. adoption will look like in a decade. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Dive Brief:

• Wayfair plans to roll out a consolidated delivery option for business-to-consumer shipments, in which customers can select a date for multiple items to be delivered at the same time, CEO, co-founder and co-chairman Niraj Shah said on a Feb. 22 earnings call.
• Delivery consolidation can help the online home goods retailer minimize shipping costs even as volumes increase. Wayfair delivered 11.3 million orders in Q4, up 2.7% year over year. "As you can imagine, delivering things one at a time is less efficient than delivering a lot of things all at once," Shah said.
• Wayfair has offered consolidated delivery to its business-to-business customers since 2017, spokesperson Jake Johnston said in an email to Supply Chain Dive. "While we’re not sharing a specific date for when this offering will be available, we are excited that it will be more widely available for consumers in the near future," Johnston said.

Dive Insight:

Wayfair's leaders see immense value in optimizing the struggling company's logistics strategy to strengthen its bottom line. Despite seeing an uptick in order volume, Wayfair still posted a $174 million net loss in Q4 and laid off 1,650 employees in January amid ongoing challenges in the home goods sector over the past year.

"In a category where ~20% of every revenue dollar is spent on some form of logistics (factory to port, ocean container freight, drayage, linehaul, warehousing, last mile delivery, etc.), where the items are prone to damage, and where speed matters, there is tremendous value in optimizing logistics operations and costs," Shah and co-founder and co-chairman Steve Conine said in a February shareholder letter.

By consolidating deliveries, Wayfair can both optimize its logistics while improving customer experience and generating additional revenue, according to Shah. The option could be attractive to customers who want all the items for a given project to be delivered at once, or those mulling another item to add to their order.

"Maybe you wouldn't have bought that coffee maker from us, but if it's going to be one of the many items you want ... delivered at the same time, you might as well just buy it from us instead of buying it somewhere else," Shah said on the call.

Because of that upside, consolidated delivery is just one of several logistics initiatives Wayfair is implementing to ease its financial woes. The company has improved its data analytics capabilities to determine the most effective last-mile delivery method for each order. It also launched free white glove delivery for certain large items, in which delivery agents provide in-home set up, Shah said.

Dive Brief:

• The Home Depot aims to deliver more professional customer orders directly from its distribution centers to free up store space and employees' time, said Ann-Marie Campbell, senior executive vice president of U.S. stores and operations, The Home Depot Canada, The Home Depot Mexico, and outside sales and service, on a Feb. 20 earnings call.
• Fulfilling more orders to pros' job sites from distribution centers rather than stores reduces store congestion and the amount of time employees have to spend picking, packing and staging for delivery, Campbell said. In Q4, nearly half of The Home Depot's online orders were fulfilled by its stores.
• Large order fulfillment via distribution centers also helps bolster in-store product availability for pro customers, Campbell said. She did not say to what extent the home improvement retailer wants to deliver Pro orders from distribution facilities versus stores.

Dive Insight:

The delivery initiative is one of several programs The Home Depot has underway to improve the experience of its lucrative Pro customers and attract more sales.

"By the end of 2024, we will have 17 of our top Pro markets equipped with new fulfillment options, localized product assortment, an expanded salesforce, and enhanced digital capabilities, with trade credit and order management in pilot or development," Chair, President and CEO Ted Decker said.

The Home Depot leverages a mix of facility types to fulfill Pro customers' orders. Its flatbed distribution centers help the company efficiently pick, pack and ship lumber and other building materials. Direct fulfillment centers, meanwhile, ship products like flooring, windows and doors.

"These facilities also rely on all of the other facilities to do their respective jobs in flowing goods to create the lowest-cost network for home improvement products," John Deaton, EVP of supply chain and product development, said in a June investor meeting. "So, the power of this network is so much bigger than just one type of building."

The Home Depot isn't the only retailer opting for more deliveries from distribution centers instead of stores. Best Buy is also leaning more on its distribution centers to fulfill orders, allowing employees to focus more on in-store sales and order pickups.

Dive Brief:

• Walmart is adding parcel stations to its stores to make the last-mile delivery process faster and more efficient, the retailer announced in November.
• These stations are "like a mini post office that receives and delivers packages," Jennifer McKeehan, SVP of transportation and delivery for Walmart U.S., said in a company blog post. Walmart plans to have more than 40 parcel stations in its stores by the end of 2023.
• With the new capability, packages in Walmart fulfillment centers are transported to store parcel stations using the company's private fleet. They are then delivered to a customer's home through independent contractors on Walmart's Spark Driver platform or third-party carriers.

Dive Insight:

Parcel stations give customers more time to place online orders on a wider assortment of products for next-day delivery, and they also make it easier and more efficient for employees to distribute orders from stores, McKeehan said.

"We plan to expand this capability to other locations next year as we better serve customers with speed, accuracy and reliability," McKeehan said.

The stations will also help Walmart build density into the last-mile delivery process, lowering the costs it incurs to reach end customers. Carriers increase density by delivering more packages per stop or per route, making more efficient use of transportation assets.

For Walmart, better density will help it bolster e-commerce margins as it looks to compete with Amazon's retooled fulfillment operations.

The retailer is already making headway in this area. CEO Doug McMillon said on a Q3 earnings call that Walmart has lowered store-to-home delivery costs by 15% as it works on "densifying the last mile."

To increase density, the company's Spark Driver network is making more deliveries from nearby stores while also delivering for other retailers through Walmart GoLocal. Walmart has increased the percentage of online orders fulfilled by stores by 800 basis points over the past year, while GoLocal is approaching 12 million deliveries made, McMillon said.

Reduced last-mile costs aren't coming at the expense of speed, according to McMillon. The retailer is also working to trim same-day delivery times for more than 80% of its stores, with speeds reaching as fast as 30 minutes in some instances.

Delivering to farmers is a tale of two seasons.

Before the growing season, farmers want a reliable pace of deliveries. Speed becomes much more important once the growing season kicks off as threats to their livelihoods, like unplanned pest invasions, emerge, Jack Cox, Farmers Business Network's VP of global fulfillment and logistics, said in an interview.

That need for in-season speed gave Farmers Business Network a good reason to accelerate delivery times on FBN Direct, its direct-to-farm commerce platform selling products like insecticides and seeds to farmers. The company announced in 2023 it has achieved delivery speeds of three days or fewer for most member orders on FBN Direct.

Cox told Supply Chain Dive that the company reached that milestone around August of 2022, after it debuted its in-house fleet of straight trucks. Improved inventory replenishment processes in 2023 have helped the company achieve that target "consistently week in and week out," he said.

"It was mostly brought on by launch of the fleet, but it really grew [in 2023] with a little refinement around how we thought about our middle mile, our cross docking and our replenishment," said Cox, who has held logistics and transportation roles at Amazon, Target and Wayfair.

Improving shipping speeds to farms requires a different calculus than what's needed for home deliveries. Remote locations, imprecise addresses and sheer size of each order — Cox said the average in-season order weight is 5,000 pounds — creates additional complexities that FBN has had to consider when strengthening its logistics network.

Although a delivery address may lead a driver to a farmer's home, that farmer doesn't want "several thousands of liters of herbicide going into their house, they want it in their shed which is somewhere else on the property," Cox said.

FBN also has to be smart with its inventory positioning throughout its network, as the size of the products it sells can take up a lot of storage space.

"How do you build your local assortment for something that may or may not sell in a given year?" Cox said. "You put some in [nearby locations], but you don't expect to capture all the demand in that local area, because if you were doing that, it would be way too expensive."

Farmers Business Network leverages its hub-and-spoke network model, which includes primary fulfillment centers and smaller satellite buildings in North America, to strike the proper inventory balance and allow for easy replenishment of supply.

More than 84% of growing acreage in the U.S. and 97% in Canada is within 250 miles of a Farmers Business Network logistics center, Cox said. Within these sweet spots, the company particularly leans on its in-house fleet to deliver orders during the growing season.

"When we do have customers on the East Coast where we haven't expanded our network yet, those customers are going to get a 3PL," Cox said. "It's really important to us that our drivers are in their beds every night."

FBN has also improved its "delivery optimization intelligence" to improve shipping speeds, meaning its systems now have awareness of all inventory positions in real time, according to the June announcement. This helps farmers find the fastest delivery alternative from throughout the company's entire network while factoring in more than just inventory proximity.

Farmers Business Network isn't done yet with its network improvements. In the future, FBN wants to deliver even faster when needed and expand its product assortment, Cox said.

"We just want to be a really easy, one-stop shop for everything a farmer needs," he said.

Amazon is pulling back the curtain on how it’s teeing up more packages to arrive on doorsteps without Amazon logos. In February, the Ships in Product Packaging program expanded by opening participation to hundreds of thousands of sellers in the U.S. and Canada that use Fulfillment by Amazon. 

Amazon itself had already been increasing the amount of items it ships without additional Amazon packaging, and the e-commerce giant announced last year that sellers would be able to join its SIPP program in 2024.

It ran a pilot program with a small group of selling partners in 2023 to learn what information sellers needed to fully understand SIPP and enroll a product. The pilot “helped us develop what is a really scalable way to provide information to sellers,” said Kayla Fenton, senior manager of packaging innovation at Amazon.

Sellers are a diverse group, Fenton said: “They have a range of interests in what’s important to them — whether that be fee incentives or customer experience or sustainability — but they also have a range of experience, especially as it relates to packaging.”

Less packaging, more savings

The SIPP push is one of Amazon’s recent packaging changes to improve company sustainability. Amazon announced last year that it would phase out plastic mailers, and it upgraded the technology at a fulfillment center in Ohio to make it the company’s first to handle fiber packaging alone — no plastic. Amazon is working to lightweight its packaging and ultimately “eliminate packaging altogether.”

Sellers who enroll in the SIPP program will receive discounts. Savings will be based on the existing FBA fee tiers — which primarily consider package size and weight — but generally they will range from 4 cents to $1.32 per unit. Even if a consumer specifically opts in during checkout to add Amazon packaging for shipment, a seller participating in SIPP will still receive their discount, Fenton said.

The level of incentives vary because “if you're avoiding adding a very large overbox to a product like a ... kitchen appliance, that's different both for the seller and for Amazon than if you're avoiding an additional package for a T-shirt that might be pretty small and also be shipping in a pretty compact package today,” she said.

Amazon previously reported that it shipped 11% of products in their own packaging in 2022. The company isn’t releasing an expectation for how that figure could grow in light of the expansion, or how many sellers currently participate in SIPP. But it’s “certainly anticipating that it increases over time,” and the company is eagerly watching this year’s adoption rate, Fenton said.

Which products make the cut?

While Amazon currently has about 2 million independent sellers worldwide, for now SIPP only is being offered for those in the U.S. or Canada, and they must be part of Fulfillment by Amazon, in which Amazon takes care of packaging for a seller’s products.

Sellers also must ensure their products meet eligibility criteria to ship without additional packaging. Size is the biggest determinant: Amazon won’t ship small products in their own packaging for numerous reasons, including the inability to put labels on them.

Other determining factors for SIPP approval include product weight or sensitivity factors. Amazon says all criteria are clarified to sellers in an online hub, Seller Central.

“At the end of the day, our first goal is to make sure that the product arrives to customers undamaged,” Fenton said. “Meeting the testing requirements is the last piece of the puzzle for a product to be enrolled.”

Products can be tested in a variety of ways, and Amazon receives the final report. Following testing, Amazon can certify a product as eligible for SIPP or recommend changes to meet program criteria.

“One seller might have to make a very minor change in order to meet our eligibility criteria. Other sellers might have to sort of think about their packaging in a bigger way and maybe sort of change the format altogether to meet standards,” Fenton said.

Some of the work to certify sellers’ products for SIPP lies inside Amazon’s Packaging Innovation Lab in Sumner, Washington. That’s the primary site for packaging innovation and testing, although some work also occurs in other locations, including third-party labs.

“Every one of these interactions with the selling partner, on the other end is one of our lab technicians. So [the sellers] are talking to people that actually know about packaging and have seen, in some cases, thousands of different items get tested,” said Josh Samples, senior manager on the packaging innovation team. “We try to give specific answers that can help them get to their certifications.”

He explained that working with such a wide variety of sellers, from big companies to mom-and-pop businesses, results in Amazon gathering scores of information from which technicians can develop customized recommendations, rather than employing a one-size-fits-all approach. The team looks for ways to improve the seller experience and speed up the SIPP onboarding process, such as by recommending that fewer items are tested if they can be grouped together for certification.

“We've had instances [where] a seller submits a bunch of different tests and test reports, when we can say, ‘Hey, actually, these are all really similar. You don't need to test every different color of a T-shirt,’” Samples said. That being said, the lab does not compare one seller’s products to another seller’s. “We wouldn't want to make inferences and say, ‘You know, what we've learned from Seller B is that T-shirts do this, and so you don't want to do it.’ We kind of assume for every single seller they're unique,” he said.

SIPP spurs creative packaging formats

One example of working with a customer on a SIPP-ready product is Amazon’s partnership with Procter & Gamble on Tide detergent packaging. The partners decided to convert the liquid-holding plastic jugs to a bag-in-box design so the product could ship in its own packaging. Compared with the jugs, the revamped packaging also includes 60% less plastic and is four pounds lighter.

Despite potential efficiency benefits from grouping similar items, Amazon does more robust testing for certain products, such as fragile items. “We try to find ways to use our capacities in the lab to help get those items [certified] and make sure that we put a real scrutinous eye on them,” Samples said.

Testing at the lab typically involves “a series of drops and vibrations,” but the methods and machines used are determined by product type, he explained. 

“We might, for example, want to understand how a large palletized item would perform when a truck comes to a screeching halt. That's not something we're going to think about for a T-shirt,” Samples said.

This year and beyond, Amazon aims to continuously improve the seller enrollment process for SIPP, although sources wouldn’t provide details on specific steps. 

“We're changing our fulfillment network every day ... using science and data to try to understand — as Amazon is building out this network and it's evolving, what should that mean about our test methods?” Samples said. “If you were to come back and ask that question three years from now, we might have totally different test methods.”