Online shopping is a great thing; having access to goods and services that might not readily be found where one lives, often at better prices, and being able to shop for same at any time of the day or night is a hard proposition to pass up.

One major problem with online shopping, though, was shipping; raised prices and lengthy delays left many shoppers frustrated. This led to demands of fast, free delivery, and these are demands being heard by retailers in many corners.

Amazon Prime is leading the way on this, with two-day shipping now available on many items, that wait for a purchased good to arrive at the home is falling through the floor. With Amazon setting the bar, other retailers must match it or risk losing sales to the popular online merchant.

Users’ definitions of fast are falling to match; 90 percent of shoppers in a Deloitte study consider “fast” delivery as anything two days or less, including “two-day,” “next-day,” and “same-day.” Sixty-three percent are more forgiving, giving “fast” nods to “three-day” and “four-day” shipping. Only 18 percent call five-to-seven day shipping “fast.”

There isn’t even much of a premium attached to this; while most would pay a maximum of $5.10 for same-day shipping, 25 percent would pay not a penny extra for such speed. This is leading to a variety of response countermeasures; some businesses are expanding ship-to-store operations to allow for faster pickup, or establishing more shipping locations.

In the end, this is actually a great development for online vendors; Amazon’s forcing of everyone’s hand requires the online retailers to actively work to ruin what was pretty much brick-and-mortar’s final saving grace: immediacy.

A brick-and-mortar store-purchased item can be taken home immediately, something even Amazon Prime can’t match…at least, not yet. The growth of Amazon’s drone delivery systems might change that, and force others to adjust to match.

It’s a lot of change in a fairly short time frame, and society is left struggling to keep up. Will we soon be looking at a shopping field dominated by online vendors and mobile payments? What will the net impact on jobs be? We’ll see what it looks like before too much longer has passed, though, and the only way to prepare for it seems to be to struggle to keep up.