So what you are saying, there are no serious technical challenges (I think there are few challenges to be solved), just bureaucratic ones. That one are always solved with money, something Amazon clearly has.
Again, this is just an idea to show how this can be much more than it is today.
That's not really what I was saying at all. I'm saying we have good reason to expect drone technology to continue to be vastly more expensive than trucks for transporting groups of packages over long distance, and little reason to believe that drones will make a significant enough impact on delivery time for it to be worth it for the types of products normally ordered from Amazon since the bottlenecks are all elsewhere.
I haven't seen too many long-distance, high-payload drones on the market either...
I suppose it depends on ones definition of "high payload". How many books to a Hellfire missile? Granted the military drones used for attack missions don't do VTOL, and aren't ready for autonomous take-off and landing (yet). But I believe there's lot of research in the area, and it doesn't seem inconceivable that a company like Amazon might get use from short, purpose-built landing-strips for similarily purpose-built drones.
Speaking of military delivery - I wonder if it might be possible to build one-off "drones-as-packaging" with maybe a parachute for breaking and a quadcopter-like design for final steering that allows for dropping "smart" packages from the sky down to a porch...
Suggesting a $5M piece of military hardware capable of carrying a single 100lb missile pretty much emphasises my point about trucks (or even motorbikes!) being far superior options for medium-long distance transit.
No matter how much research goes into developing commercial alternatives, carrying books through the air over long distances at speed rather than driving them along roads will expend significantly more energy and cost more money, because physics.
And whilst getting goods by parachute might have novelty value if I'm around to watch or be extremely useful if I'm stuck somewhere up a mountain, for everyday goods delivery I'd frankly rather have them handed to me by a person that considers the goods "delivered" when they're in my hands rather than probably in the right garden. It's also why their current delivery drivers aren't encouraged to save time by throwing non-fragile items at customers' houses as they drive past.
Again, this is just an idea to show how this can be much more than it is today.