Supply Chain News: Amazon Keeps Moving, with Bike Delivery Tests, New Private Label Line, Aggressive Robot Rollout and More

From SCDigest’s On-Target E-Magazine Company Putting Heat on FAA to Allow Drone Testing, as Whole Industry is Moving Overseas SCDigest Editorial Staff Another week, more new programs and fulfillment innovation at Amazon.com First, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that Amazon is testing bike couriers in New York City in an effort to deliver on-line orders in one hour or less. The report says Amazon has been holding time trials using bikes riders from at least three courier services to identify which is the speediest and most diligent for the bicycle-based delivery mode. SCDigest Says: Each Amazon Elements package will have a unique code that can be scanned using the Amazon mobile shopping app to track the specific ingredients and their origins; its date and place of manufacture, date of delivery, and ‘best if used by’ date. The bike service has been dubbed "Amazon Prime Now" and is operating out of the company’s new building in Manhattan. This obviously opens up a new fulfillment path in addition to use of its own trucks, commercial taxis, drones and other approaches the company has tested in the past year or so. The Amazon Prime Now test marks the company’s first US move into superfast delivery, where it faces challengers that include eBay’s eBay Now service as well as startups like WunWun, Postmates, and car-for-hire firm Uber Technologies, which launched its own bike courier service in New York City called Uber Rush earlier this year. eBay, however, is said to have scaled back the ambition of its eBay Now service, which dispatches "valets" to stores to retrieve merchandise, acknowledging the challenges of one-hour delivery, whether operational or relative to the current size of the market. Relative to drones, Amazon is said to have recently begun testing drones in the UK even […]