Dive Brief:

• Amazon is apparently taking a page from Uber’s crowdsourcing approach and is developing an app to crowdsource deliveries, the Wall Street Journal reports.

• The service, internally dubbed “On My Way,” according to the Wall Street Journal, would have ordinary people paid to pick up and drop off packages for Amazon as they go about their other errands.

• Amazon, which has been instrumental in driving same-day and one-hour deliveries, has seen shipping costs increase more than 30% last year.

Dive Insight:

Crowdsourcing deliveries and using contract workers — essentially ordinary people driving their own cars — is nothing new at this point. In fact, it’s the basic idea behind Uber (which, in addition to taxi services, is getting into retail deliveries), and delivery services like Deliv and Instacart use contract drivers.

But those services aren’t without their challenges. There’s a lot of turnover among such drivers, and, in exchange for little to no job security or guaranteed hours and not a lot of pay, drivers are available on a whim — their own. What Amazon might save in money it could spend in a host of new headaches.

In any case, this idea doesn’t sound like it’s been developed very far in Seattle. Stay tuned.