Amazon’s Record Delivery Speeds Don’t Extend Past the US Border

Amazon’s second-quarter 2026 earnings, reported July 30, gave a clear picture of how fast US e-commerce has gotten. The company said it delivered more than 40% more items same-day or overnight in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year. It also passed a milestone of 1 million robots deployed across its fulfillment network and plans to more than double its fleet of Cardinal and Sparrow robotic arms — machines that load and sort packages faster than human pickers ever could. Amazon is backing the push with an extra $20 billion in AI and technology spending, and it’s expanding its ultra-fast “Amazon Now” delivery format to roughly 80 US cities and towns, plus a handful of cities abroad, including in Egypt.

For anyone shopping from a US address, that’s a genuinely good story: faster fulfillment, more items eligible for same-day delivery, and a warehouse network that’s only getting quicker at getting a box off the shelf and onto a truck.

The part that doesn’t reach shoppers outside the US

Here’s the catch. Amazon’s speed investments are built around US delivery infrastructure — and, so far, a small number of pilot cities overseas. For the much larger group of shoppers and resellers outside the US who rely on Amazon’s catalog and prices, none of that robotic efficiency changes the experience, because the bottleneck was never how fast the warehouse could pick and pack an order. It’s what happens after the box leaves the building and has to cross a border. Plenty of listings are still marked “this item cannot be shipped to your selected destination,” international shipping quotes are often inflated or unavailable, and even when an order does ship internationally, it moves at a completely different speed and cost than the domestic delivery Amazon is racing to shrink.

In other words, Amazon just proved it can get a package off the shelf in record time. Getting it to Riyadh, Mexico City, or Jakarta is still a separate problem — and one the company’s latest investments aren’t really aimed at solving.

The workaround: shop like you’re in the US, because you are

The simplest fix is to remove the border from the equation entirely, at least on Amazon’s end. That means checking out with a US shipping address instead of your home address. To Amazon, the order looks like any other domestic delivery, so it ships at full US speed with none of the “ineligible for international shipping” friction. What happens after that box arrives is a separate, and much more flexible, step.

This is the gap that package-forwarding services like Viabox are built for. You get a real US address — Viabox’s warehouse is in Portland, Oregon — that receives packages exactly the way any US shopper’s doorstep would, whether the order comes from Amazon or any other US retailer. From there, packages can be consolidated and forwarded on to wherever you actually live. A few practical advantages worth knowing:

• Orders qualify for domestic Amazon shipping speeds and Prime eligibility, since the delivery address is inside the US.
• Multiple purchases — from Amazon and other stores — can be combined into a single international shipment, which usually costs less than shipping each order separately.
• It works for any US retailer, not just Amazon, so sellers who simply don’t ship internationally at all are no longer off-limits.

The gap is likely to widen, not close

Amazon isn’t slowing down this build-out. With robotic arm fleets doubling and billions more going into automation and same-day infrastructure, the difference between the US shopping experience and everyone else’s is more likely to grow than shrink in the near term — Amazon Now, for instance, is still limited to a relative handful of cities worldwide. For international shoppers and resellers who want access to the same US catalog, prices, and delivery speed that domestic customers already enjoy, a US forwarding address is a straightforward way to close that gap yourself rather than wait for Amazon to close it for you.

If you regularly buy from Amazon or other US stores and ship internationally, a free Viabox US address is worth setting up before your next order — it turns Amazon’s domestic speed advantage into your advantage too.