Amazon continues to attempt to deal with the unexpected surge in orders.
For those of you who've read various stories about Amazon branded deliveries stopping or Amazon ending deals with other sites: this is what it is about -- reducing "non-essential" order load.
Amazon has been hit with a huge increase in orders. Last year Amazon planned to hire 200K seasonal workers for Christmas and now they have indicated need for 175K additional people to manage the COVID-19 surge in orders, indicating that their current surge approximates Christmas. Amazon plans for months to handle Christmas and for whatever reason, they didn't begin executing on this surge until far too late in the process, when they started delaying receipt of third party shipments into their FCs and non-essential orders suddenly began being delayed for weeks.
This is not a breakdown on the shipping side: that is characterized by orders leaving Amazon on time and being delayed in shipping. That happens every Christmas, and Amazon attempted to increase their control over shipping delays for Christmas 2019 by not renewing their FedEx Ground contract and moving more shipments to Amazon Logistics, although FedEx was added back as an option in January 2020.
This has been a breakdown on the order side: time to fill even essential item orders increasing and shipping matching predictions.
Amazon announced they had already increased order capacity by 60%. For comparison, my digital downloads unit at Amazon had roughly six times the orders at Christmas peak compared with the beginning of fall.
Amazon announced they had already increased order capacity by 60%. For comparison, my digital downloads unit at Amazon had roughly six times the orders at Christmas peak compared with the beginning of fall.
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