Amazon Surpasses Legacy Carriers in U.S. Parcel Shipments

While Amazon’s signature blue delivery vans are ubiquitous across North America and Europe these days, there was a time when the world’s largest online retailer relied (almost) entirely on traditional carriers to deliver its packages. That dynamic began to shift following the 2013 holiday shopping season, when severe weather and surging online sales had caused widespread delivery delays, leaving Amazon with disappointed customers and little control over the last mile. In response, the e-commerce giant quietly began building its own end-to-end logistics empire, investing heavily in fulfillment centers, regional sorting hubs, dedicated cargo aircraft and those signature delivery vans.

Considering Amazon’s market power and the scale of its investments, it’s no surprise that the company’s delivery push eventually upended the U.S. carrier hierarchy. According to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index, Amazon Logistics became the largest carrier by parcel volume in the United States in 2025, handling 6.9 billion parcels to capture nearly 30 percent of the total market. In doing so, Amazon surpassed USPS, which saw its volume drop from 6.9 billion in 2024 to 6.2 billion in 2025. Legacy giants UPS and FedEx handled 4.3 billion and 3.9 billion parcels, respectively, while alternative and regional carriers more than doubled their collective volume to 1.8 billion packages, partly driven by continued increases in volume from Chinese retailers Shein and Temu.

Amazon’s rise to shipping supremacy comes with a hefty price tag. Globally, the company’s shipping and fulfillment costs amounted to $212 billion or almost 30 percent of total sales in 2025. That’s up from just $15 billion (20 percent of sales) in 2013 and not counting the hundreds of billions of dollars the company has invested in building its own logistics network over the past decade.