When the world took a pause during the pandemic, Amazon quietly hired an extra 400,000 workers to deliver goods from its warehouses across the country, pushing its total employee count to 1.1 million people.
People hit the buy button on Amazon.com about 13 million times a day. That’s over 66 thousand orders per hour or 18.5 per second. Then like magic, the same day or 3 days later, those 13 million orders get delivered like clockwork.
Which begs the question, how the hell does Amazon fulfill that many orders?
As it turns out, Amazon’s fulfillment system is more complicated and convoluted that any logistics company on the planet. Operationally the company competes more with FedX and UPS than they do with retailers like Walmart or Target.
So there are definitely a few factors in Amazon’s business structure that allow the company to ship and deliver customer orders so damn effectively.
Compared to it’s competitors, Amazon’s supply chain and logistics operations are far more advanced. Amazon strategically builds fulfillment centers in or near urban cities to best reach as many customers as possible. They have over 180 fulfillment centers and continues to expand every year…
The reason Amazon’s can keeps their shipping cost low in comparison to competitors by taking over the entire supply chain including delivery.
This way, Amazon doesn’t have to pay third-party companies to manage their fulfillment.
