Are you seeing faster deliveries on Amazon Prime orders? The company says it hit its "fastest Prime speeds ever" in Q2, resulting in more same- and next-day deliveries for US customers.

“Across the top 60 largest US metro areas, more than half of Prime member orders arrived the same or next day,” says Doug Herrington, Amazon CEO of Worldwide Stores.

For this year, the company has already delivered more than 1.8 billion units to US Prime subscribers through the same-day or next-day shipping, a four times increase from 2019, when Amazon announced it wanted to make one-day shipping the standard.

Amazon Prime dates back to 2005. But at the time, it only offered free two-day shipping on over 1 million items. It has since expanded to 300 million products. "Tens of millions of the most popular items” can arrive with same- or next-day shipping via Amazon Prime, Herrington says.

That said, the accomplishment may stir up concerns about labor conditions at Amazon warehouses, where turnover can be high. But according to Herrington, the e-commerce giant has been increasing the shipping time by streamlining Amazon’s logistics networks into eight regional hubs, resulting in fewer handoffs and miles traveled for shipped products.

“It’s easy to assume the faster we deliver, the faster employees work—but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The speed improvements we’re making come primarily from placing products closer to customers,” he says. “The people picking, packing, and driving to your house are doing the exact same thing for orders that arrive the same or next day as orders that used to take two or three days.”

The streamlining has reduced injuries at warehouses, Amazon says. “From 2019 to 2022, we saw a 23% reduction in our US recordable incident rate and a 69% reduction in our lost time incident rate, measures that help gauge the frequency of serious injuries,” Herrington says.

To improve shipping times, Amazon says it will increase the number of same-day delivery facilities for large metro areas. “Same-day delivery is currently available on millions of items for customers across more than 90 US metro areas, and we have plans to double the number of sites in the coming years,” Herrington says.

Amazon is hoping fast delivery times will help the Prime subscription program stand out from the competition, which includes Walmart+. Last year, Amazon increased the price to Prime from $119 to $139 per year; Walmart+ is $98 per year.

Herrington adds: “If we continue to invest in improving delivery speeds and an ever-growing product selection, customers will continue to choose Amazon and Prime."

The company has also been tapping AI “to better predict which items customers in various parts of the country will want and when they will want them,” Herrington says. “This helps to ensure that we have the right inventory, in the right places, at the right time."