You can't help but be impressed when an Amazon order arrives via same-day delivery. How does Amazon do it? By opening a number of smaller warehouses located much closer to cities.
As Reuters reports, Amazon's massive fulfillment centers are located far away from cities and house over 100 million items for the more typical two-day delivery option. However, in order to fulfill same-day delivery orders, Amazon opted to open new warehouses with each being around a tenth of the size of a fulfillment center and located close to the city it serves.
Each warehouse handles storage, picking, packing, sorting, and delivery from a single building roughly 100,000 square feet in size. Inside you'll find a small army of Amazon's robots intelligently moving shelves around for items to be picked from. The other benefit of these smaller warehouses is lower carbon emissions from shorter journeys to deliver the orders.
The latest cities to benefit from the same-day delivery option are Phoenix, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Orlando. Prime members qualify for same-day delivery if their order total is $35 or more. Non-Prime customers are charged $12.98 for same-day delivery, where as a yearly Prime membership is $119 and includes many more benefits than just faster, free deliveries.
Last year Amazon committed to evolving its free two-day shipping program for Prime customers to become free one-day shipping. It seems likely these smaller warehouses close to major cities will play a major role in helping hit that target as well as serving same-day delivery orders.
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