Key takeaways
- Everyday essentials like toilet paper once took 5-8 days to arrive from Amazon, but as delivery speeds improved, they became top-selling items.
- The faster Amazon delivers, the more customers buy—and the sooner they return to shop again.
- 1-hour delivery is now available in hundreds of U.S. cities and towns, with 3-hour delivery available in over 2,000, for top items.
Speed matters to customers, and Amazon has the data to prove it.
"When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up," Doug Herrington, Amazon's CEO of Worldwide Stores, explained in a recent episode of his Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington podcast. "And what's even more interesting is that if they buy it, they're going to come back sooner, and they're going to shop more when they do."
In the new episode, Herrington sat down with Kandace Kapps, a director on Amazon’s Same-Day strategy team, and shared how he saw the speed effect firsthand when Amazon first added toilet paper to its selection, years before Prime existed. Back then, most customers received deliveries in five to eight days.
"There is a set of people who will wait five to eight days to get their toilet paper when they've run out," Herrington said. "But it's actually a very small set of people."
As Amazon introduced two-day Prime delivery, then one-day, and eventually Same-Day Delivery measured in hours, more customers felt comfortable ordering everyday essentials online. Today, toilet paper ranks as one of Amazon's top-selling items.
How Amazon delivers in hours
The engine behind Amazon's speed improvements is a network of Same-Day Delivery buildings located close to customers in metropolitan areas. These facilities carry more than 90,000 items—from AirPods to diapers to fresh produce.
Kapps explained that the Same-Day buildings are intentionally designed and “located as close as possible to our customers so we can get to them with the fastest speed viable.”
Unlike traditional fulfillment centers, these buildings combine everything under one roof: electronics, household goods, groceries, and pharmacy items. They also function as delivery stations, allowing packages to go directly from the shelf to a customer's doorstep within hours.
"We can watch an order, a customer can place an order, it can drop on the floor and be picked and packed and on the dock within 15 minutes," Herrington said.
Amazon recently expanded its fastest delivery options across more product categories. Customers in certain parts of the U.S. can now choose 1-hour delivery and 3-hour delivery on the full selection available in Same-Day buildings.
"I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver at their doorstep," Kapps said.
Kapps, who has worked at Amazon for nearly 15 years, said the Same-Day network appeals especially to busy families. As a parent of a toddler, she orders from Amazon two to three times more frequently than before.
Amazon achieved record delivery speeds in 2023, 2024, and 2025 while also improving safety performance each year.
The first two episodes of Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington are now available wherever you listen to podcasts.
