Amazon: what happens after cargo ships reach the US?

 

As advanced in a previous article, your Amazon product will travel on a cargo ship on a journey that may take 20 days approximately.

Once it reaches the US, it has to wait for a spot to open up at the dock. This may take as long as two months at the largest ports. Won’t that cause delivery delays? To solve this issue, some Amazon products are loaded onto the firm’s chartered ships. These are usually smaller and they can skip port delays.

Once the shipping container manages to reach the terminal, it is stacked on a spot based on its destination and scheduled pick-up date. There, it will wait for a truck to pick it up and transport it to an Amazon fulfillment centre where packages are unloaded and transferred onto pallets.

Each package is scanned by an employee and is stored into a cubby inside a robotic pod. There are thousands of these inside warehouses and the product remains stored there until it is ordered online. When that happens, a robot will automatically roll the correct pod to a picking station. Then, a worker will pack, tape and label the product. It is then transported to a sortation centre where it is sorted based on location and delivery speed. Finally, the Amazon product is sent to your house.

Photo credit: Anestiev from Pixabay

Amazon has small chartered ships to unload products