Amazon is developing a new mobile application that recruits and pays ordinary people to be carriers of packages as they travel to various destinations, doing away with the need for FedEx, UPS, and even the United States Postal Service. Under the company’s newest forward integration strategy known as “On My Way,” Amazon would rent space from retailers who store packages. Amazon ships an average of 3.5 million packages per day. This concept, also called “crowdsourced delivery using contract laborers,” is similar to what Uber Technologies Inc. is doing in the taxi industry. Amazon is still testing its “On My Way” strategy to resolve potential issues such as what happens if the package is damaged or even stolen by the transporter. Part of the motivation for the new strategy is that Amazon’s shipping costs increased to $8.7 billion in 2014 or 9.8 percent of revenues, up from 8.9 percent the prior year.

Based on: Greg Bensinger, “Amazon’s Next Delivery Drone: You,” Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2015, B1-B2.