Your impulse buys are costing Amazon a fortune - CNET

Amazon has been able to hook you with Prime, its $99-a-year membership service that offers two-day deliveries at no additional fees. While Prime has been a big success for the company and helped it grow faster than the broader e-commerce market, it's also resulted in big shipping costs that the annual fees don't fully cover. And while Amazon tends to think long-term, happily giving up a buck today to keep you happy through tomorrow, there are a handful of projects the company is doing that could help ensure Amazon can keep sending those speedy deliveries to you without losing so much money in the process.

On Thursday, Amazon posted weaker-than-expected eaings for its all-important holiday quarter, which drove down its stock by more than 12 percent after-hours. Shipping and fulfillment costs didn't help the situation, with both growing at a faster rate than revenue. Overall shipping costs shot up 37 percent to $1.8 billion, outpacing a 22 percent rise in revenue to $35.7 billion.

So far, Amazon hasn't pushed customers all that much to change their behavior on its site, but it's included a few tools to coax people to bundle purchases or request a slower shipping option. For instance, the company offers Prime members a $1 credit for ebooks or digital videos when they opt for five-day shipping instead of two. Also, under its "add-on" program, Amazon ships thousands of lower-priced items only when they're bundled in a $25 order.

Retail and shipping experts expect Amazon to test out more ways to get customers to pick cheaper shipping, though folks accustomed to two-day deliveries may still reject those options.

Of course, Amazon could also raise the price of Prime, which was last increased in early 2014 by $20. Yet, with the company making a huge push to expand the ranks of Prime -- now estimated at 54 million US members -- such a move seems unlikely.

That push has paid off. Despite missing Wall Street's expectations, Amazon posted sales of $107 billion for 2015, the first time it's crossed the $100 billion mark.

Amazon will probably keep pushing into physical locations to help it cut down on shipping costs, Wurmser said. The company already offers pickup and retu locations in office buildings and retail stores through its Amazon Lockers program. It's also been expanding its staffed pickup centers at universities, coming to two more schools this year. It even opened its first bookstore late last year in Seattle.

An Amazon representative declined to comment for this story.

Behind the scenes, Amazon has been building up its delivery infrastructure in hopes of cutting more expenses. Last month, the company unveiled a fleet of thousands of Amazon-branded truck trailers, which it will use to move around its inventory between its warehouses. Beyond that, Amazon has reportedly been testing plans to lease 20 Boeing cargo jets, which could help it avoid storing the same inventory in multiple locations around the US to guarantee its two-day deliveries. Amazon also opted to purchase the rest of French package-delivery company Colis Prive it didn't already own and now offers an Uber-like service called Flex, which hires regular folks to deliver its packages in 14 US markets.

"Amazon is effectively making its own carrier in the US," said Jarrett Streebin, CEO of EasyPost, which offers e-commerce shipping services.

Whether this means Amazon will eventually compete with FedEx and UPS is an open question being hotly debated now in the shipping industry.