Amazon Opens Two Fulfillment Centers in Joliet
The American online retailer aims to expand its fulfillment center network to speed up its deliveries.
Amazon keeps increasing its US fulfillment centers, announcing on 27th May 2016 that it would set up its new center in Joilet, Ill. That would establish the second facility in the city whereas adding 2000 job opportunities to the region. The size of the newly developed facility wasn’t disclosed, but most of the online retailer’s centers can cover thousands of square feet, or be equivalent to the size of a large number of football fields.
The company uses those facilities as warehouses to keep its own inventory and for third-party sellers who are interested in selling items to company’s expected 50,000 Prime members. Prime memberships pay $99 on an annual basis to get everything from diapers to books to toilet paper sold to them in 48 hours or less.
The Seattle based organization stated the second center in the city would be used to ship and pack smaller shipments. Increasingly, these consignments are being shipped in few hours through the company’s service Prime Now, a part of the online trading platform operator’s aggressive approach for delivering items to customers as soon as possible.
The new facility could prove to be a central region for delivering items to the city of Chicago as it’s just 40 miles away from it. The web retailer keeps expanding its US fulfillment centers as its fulfillment operations for third-party merchants keeps growing. Now, outside merchants contribute to over 45% of total items sold on the organization’s marketplace, a 5% growth since Jan 2016.
That tells us that Amazon probably needs to develop more logistics and space for these items. A report from the last year has revealed that the company was running 104 facilities in the North American region as well as 69 fulfillment centers outside North America. In recent times, the organization announced plans for setting up a new center in the city of Kansas.
The company will not only establish its centers in Joilet, but it will also set up centers in East vale and Tracy that will provide over 1500 new full-time job opportunities. It stated the new centers will extend its presence in California to 9 fulfillment centers, approximately 14,000 full-time hourly associates and 9 million square feet of operations.
Presently, the company fulfills consumer orders at a number of fulfillment centers in the state. These include San Bernardino, Rialto, Redlands, Moreno Valley, Patterson and Tracy. The organization also runs sortation center operations in the cities of San Bernardino as well as Newark.The new centers will cover a space of 1 million square feet and will hire a large number of employees.
