Amazon: Behind the 'Buy Now' Button
- Ingrid Guo
- Jan 1, 2021
- 3 min read
Author: Emily Hammond '23
Have you ever wondered what is behind the Amazon “buy now” button? What happens to your item between that casual internet click and the thrill of the package arriving on your doorstep? Amazon is the biggest online shopping retailer in the world, and Jeff Bezos is the richest man on Earth, curious about the secret behind all of that? Anyone can find out by taking a free tour of an Amazon warehouse like the one in Robbinsville, NJ, just 20 minutes from Lawrenceville’s campus.
Amazon has offered tours for almost a decade. I took a tour of our local Amazon fulfillment center last winter. The warehouse was packed with multilayer conveyor belts, sorting robots, and rows and rows and rows and rows of items. Everything you could possibly imagine, from books to bicycles and beyond. The facility was around 800,000 square feet. The robots knew exactly where everything was stored and each had an incredibly efficient system to make sure your item gets to you as fast as possible. Boxes whizzed by me at every angle of the gigantic warehouse. My guide walked me through the seemingly endless steps an order goes through before a package leaves the warehouse, all at warp speed.
The first step is to receive. Amazon catalogs any item you can think of on their website from a range of different companies. In this step, the item is picked and packaged. Then the item is sorted and labeled before being organized into big black tubs. The next step is storage. There are shelves from one end of the building to the other, packed with brightly colored items in every shape and size. Bar codes assigned to each item and every shelf keep everything organized and accounted for. Some of the shelves are even mounted on robots that know exactly what is on the shelves they wheel around. The third step is picking. If you order more than one item, it is quite likely that each item is picked by a different robot and possibly in a different warehouse altogether. The process of finding items people have ordered is simple thanks to robots that are connected to the endless online catalog. The fourth step is flow. Engineers watch conveyor belts over security cameras to make sure they are all functioning correctly. Operations workers watch the workflow of the building and the workers through closed-circuit monitors. The fifth step is packing. Packers are given jobs such as single item packing and multi-item packing in order to ensure efficiency. Packers scan items and the computer tells them which size box is needed. This cuts down on waste. The sixth step is SLAM. SLAM stands for Scan, Label, Apply, and Manifest. Packages are scanned and then placed onto a convey belt where a robot applies the mailing label with your address using air pressure. Boxes then get sorted based on size and are ready to be shipped. The last step is ship. Packages are loaded onto trucks and off they go!
The combination of state of the art technology and robotic precision makes sure that every Amazon package is delivered to your doorstep within two days if you have Amazon PRIME!! But wow, was it LOUD!
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