Amazon commits to offering Sunday deliveries

Thursday, November 28, 2013 - 13:48 by Mike Price

At the moment, anyone in the UK who orders a parcel from Amazon on a Saturday will have to wait until at least Monday for it to be delivered.

However, this week the e-commerce giant revealed that it will be rolling out Sunday deliveries for British consumers, or at least the large number of its customers who live in London, according to TechRadar.

This plan to deliver orders placed online on a day that has traditionally been free of such activity, is being enacted over the festive period, which will help Amazon to deal with the huge flood of purchases that will be made ahead of Christmas 2013.

While the firm did not say whether Sunday deliveries will continue next year, there were rumours suggesting that it was intending to do so across the pond in the US, where the Wall Street Journal reported on a heavily redacted contract agreed by the Postal Service and an unnamed retailer, believed to be Amazon.

Deliveries on a Sunday have already begun in America and the contract lasts a full five years, which means it is no short term agreement.

In the UK, it was said by Amazon that a number of different contractors will be used to fulfil the Sunday deliveries required by safe shopping online throughout December, which implies that it has not struck a bargain with a single organisation.

Whether this fragmentation will pose problems for the future of Sunday deliveries in the UK remains to be seen, but no doubt, many consumers would like to get their items as quickly as possible no matter what day of the week it is. And in today's modern society, it seems incredibly archaic to treat Sunday as a period during which logistics providers cease to operate for no good reason.