There’s been a lot of talk recently about how supply-chain disruptions will have a major impact on the way customers shop and prepare for the holiday season. With that in mind, I wanted to share what we’re doing to ensure customers enjoy a great experience when shopping with us this season—from a wide selection of top products in our store with great priceto the fast delivery of those items to their doorstep.
At Amazon, preparation for the holiday season begins on January 1. From that moment on, our teams work hard to meet our customers’ needs for the holidays ahead. We’ve hired even more people and invested in technology to help us better predict what products our customers will want—and where and when they’ll want to receive them.
We’ve also continued to invest in our transportation capabilities, creating a supply chain that is built for an environment where safety, speed, and efficiency are of the essence. Our teams have been hard at work for months, focusing on capacity and demand planning to balance our customers’ needs against any supply chain or transportation challenges that may occur. While we are always investing in our supply chain and transportation network, we have done even more this year to ensure we don’t let recent supply-chain constraints impact the Amazon experience for our customers.
Here are just some of the investments we’ve made across our supply-chain planning, transportation, and delivery teams to ensure we are ready to get customers what they want, when they want it, wherever they are this holiday season:
- We’ve continually invested in technology to better forecast the products our customers want and need, and work closely with our vendors and selling partners to get them in our fulfillment locations close to customers.
- We’ve invested in people, aircraft, ships, and buildings to ensure we have more options in the ways to get things from A to B. We’ve also built a network of strong partnerships across the supply chain to give us the flexibility we need to get the right things to the right places when customers need them.
- A key example is how we’ve organized our global logistics network to better manage the flow of inventory across the world. We’ve increased ports of entry across our network by 50%, doubled our container processing capacity, and expanded our ocean freight carrier network partnerships to secure committed capacity into critical ports within our network.
- Another example is our recent expansion of our Amazon Air cargo fleet. Later this season, we will have more than 85 aircraft in our fleet, ensuring ample capacity to transport customer packages across longer distances in shorter timeframes all season long.
- Our Amazon Freight network operates a pool of more than 50,000 trailers, which haul freight across the world. These trailers are powered by tens of thousands of small businesses that collectively employ tens of thousands more drivers to make these shipments possible.
- We have more than 800 delivery stations globally, employing tens of thousands of people who ready packages for the delivery process. And, our delivery network grew to more than 260,000 drivers worldwide across our Delivery Service Partner program, supported by hundreds of thousands more Amazon Flex drivers—these are the people who deliver the holiday magic to your doorstep.
- These investments have also allowed us to provide customers with even more options for fast delivery. Last-minute shoppers have access to millions of items available with faster than Same-Day Delivery—with orders arriving in as fast as five hours from click to doorstep in 15 metro areas.
All of these teams seamlessly work with the more than 1 million Amazon employees around the world, and the additional 150,000 seasonal fulfillment and delivery roles we’re hiring for across the U.S. to help stow, pick, pack, and ship customer orders. We’re proud to provide our employees with great pay, great benefits, and a safe work environment to ensure they have everything they need to deliver for customers.
Since March 2020, we have learned to expect the unexpected and that there may be bumps along the way—and that we have a great customer service team at the ready to assist customers should they need it.
We hope our customers rest easy and have a safe, healthy, and happy holiday season with their loved ones. We prepare all year round for this time of year, and we are excited and ready to deliver for you.
Watch SVP John Felton discuss how Amazon is preparing to serve customers this season with The Today Show.
