The Life of an Amazon Order

By Peter Andringa

Few things in the modern world are as magical as Amazon's logistics network. Through cutting-edge technology and a billion-dollar infrastructure, a single click can deliver almost anything to your doorstep in two days, if not 8 hours. Few, however, know exactly what happens to make this magic possible.

Once you click the magical "place order" button from your laptop, phone, iPad, or dash button, your order information is instantaneously sent to Amazon's global network of servers in the cloud. The company owns 6 million servers in more than 68 data centers spread around the world across almost every continent. They use some of this capacity to run their own operations, but much of their computing power is rented to other companies through their Amazon Web Services division, which makes in more than $15 billion in revenue each year.

In seconds, Amazon's cloud routes your order to one of their many "Fufillment Centers": hyper-effecient warehouses built by Amazon across the globe. As of January 2017, Amazon had more than 90 fufillment centers in the US, and dozens more internationally. These facilities are massive: many are more than 1 million square feet, giving Amazon room to store the 372 million products they offer in their marketplace.

Less than a minute after placing your order, one of Amazon's "Kiva" robots whirs to life to retrieve your items. Amazon's warehouses are filled with thousands of tall shelving units, packed close together and in seemingly random order. These shelving units contain an assortment of items, all mixed together to ensure that a given product is spread throughout the warehouse. Amazon's fleet of more than 45,000 Kiva robots knows which shelf each item is on, and one of them will navigate to the particular shelving unit and pick up the entire tower. This allows Amazon to store far more products than in a traditional warehouse, because it doesn't require the humans to walk around.

The robot then ferries the shelf to a human "picker" whose computer screen tells them where the items are on the shelf. The picker takes each item off the shelf, inspects it for visible damage, then places it in a yellow plastic bin on a conveyor belt, where it is whisked off to be packed and shipped.

That bin then makes its way down a series of conveyor belts until it arrives at a packing station with a waiting employee. There, the system tells the employee which size box to use and cuts off exact lengths of tape and packaging filler for the employee to pack the item. Once the item is inside a box, a large machine stamps it with a shipping label and sends it off to the shipping bays.

From there, the box is directed through a series of conveyor belts to the correct 18-wheeler, where it is tightly packed among other boxes in a life-sized game of Tetris. Once the truck is filled, it leaves the warehouse for the next stop in Amazon's logstics chain: distribution hubs for the major logistics and delivery companies.

The trucks then hit the road to travel across the country. Some packages will make their way onto Fedex and UPS planes, while others will go onto Amazon's own fleet of "Prime Air" jets, which were launched in 2016. Amazon has also been testing their own fleet of container ships for storing and moving inventory around the globe.

Packages are then sent to a regional sorting center where they are put on trucks for home delivery. Amazon is also developing it's own fleet of drones to complete this "last mile," and is already testing them in some regions of the UK. This entire process - from order to delivery - can take as little as 8 hours, and nearly every package can be delivered anywhere in the US in two days. This feat of logistics is only made possible by Amazon's massive scale, which continues to support their domination of modern retail.