[michaelt]

  Amazon’s in-house delivery initiatives have not been 
  without hiccups. [...] Perhaps Amazon could benefit from 
  the slew of startups entering the space, either through 
  acquisition, or by learning from and copying and 
  identified best practices.

Seems to me if you're going to acquire a company for its experience, it would be better to acquire a company that had experience.

The startups that are legible in their 'age vs quality estimate', Kanga and Shyp, rely on self-employed subcontractors using smart phones. Here in the UK, delivery services like Yodel that use self-employed drivers have shitty reputations [1]; if Amazon want to improve end-to-end customer experience, I'd be surprised if they went down that route.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jan/10/yodel-worst-par...

[aardvark179]

Most of my packages from Amazon over recent months have come via Amazon Logistics. Since our office reception takes delivery I don't know if they are using self employed drivers, but they do seem to have the notification infrastructure right as I get an email about the package being delivered before office reception can phone me. If they can start to narrow the estimated delivery time down then I think they'll have really improved things.