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From the click of a button to the ring of a doorbell several hours later, it may be easy for Amazon Prime members to overlook what happens behind the scenes in between “add to cart” and “your order has arrived.”

As Amazon makes one-day shipping the norm for its more than 150 million Prime users nationwide, the e-commerce giant says it is striving to deliver more products at faster speeds for customers, while also continuing to lower costs and improve employee safety.

Citing growing customer demand for rapid order fulfillment, Amazon Worldwide Stores Chief Executive Officer Doug Herrington announced plans in July to double its same-day delivery network, which presently stands at 51 facilities across the U.S. that serve more than 90 metropolitan areas.

Upon launching Prime in 2005, Amazon initially offered the service’s members free two-day shipping on 1 million items. Over the years, it’s become more expansive and quicker and now has more than 300 million products available with free Prime shipping and tens of millions of the most popular products available with free same-day or one-day delivery.

So far this year, Amazon delivered more than 1.8 billion items to Prime members in the U.S. via same or next-day services – nearly four times what was delivered at those speeds in 2019, which includes 77 million orders in the tri-state area.

Designed with smaller footprints, Amazon’s last-mile delivery centers feature hundreds of robotic carriers and miles of conveyor belts that help workers pick, pack and ship products to customers.

According to Amazon, the average time for items to move through a same-day facility is about 11 minutes – over an hour faster than traditional fulfillment centers. From there, orders are delivered to customers within five to seven hours.

Inventory varies by city, as Amazon regularly refreshes its product offering based on what it sees as top customer items purchased or based on seasonal demand in the area, such as back-to-school or holidays.

That approach, Herrington said, makes it faster and less expensive to get those products to customers. Regionalizing the network also reduces miles traveled and handoffs, making for a more cost effective and efficient delivery system with fewer emissions.

Since launching in November 2022, Amazon’s location in Woodland Park has become one of the top same-day delivery facilities in the U.S., processing about 50,000 customer orders daily. Amazon already has a similar site in Burlington, covering South Jersey.

Located at Kearfott Corp.’s former corporate headquarters at 1150 McBride Ave., the 16-acre property was purchased last year by Kushner Real Estate Group and The STRO Cos., redeveloped and then leased to Amazon.

Inside the 205,000-square-foot warehouse there are only the 100,000 most popular products among Amazon shoppers in the North Jersey area, with the primary categories ranging from beauty and toiletries to child care and baby goods to household and consumer electronics, according to site leader Drew McCrossan.

To determine “the most commonly purchased, hottest products” for its same-day delivery inventory, McCrossan said the company uses a range of data to “predict what people will want at different times.”

In addition to the surrounding area, as well as customer market and seasonality of products, items in stock are also determined by how frequently shoppers are visiting a product page on Amazon.com and how long are they lingering there to look at product details, along with general sales information over the past week and month, he said.

“We do a refresh every two of three months, so the stuff that we no longer want to keep as same day, we’ll ship to another Amazon FC [fulfillment center]. It’s still kept in inventory, but just not carried in same-day inventory and we’ll bring in the new products,” McCrossan explained.

Using a semi-automatic process, employees are aided by Kiva robotic carts that bring customer orders ready for packaging. From there, workers pack each item to prepare it for shipping and send it down a conveyer belt where a scanner ensures the packing label is correct.

Then, the package is put on another conveyer and sent to an area where it is ultimately retrieved by Amazon Flex drivers, who play an important role in getting those orders the last mile to customers in New Jersey, said McCrossan.

Launched in 2015, Flex drivers are on-demand contract workers who can earn anywhere from $18 to $25 per hour for delivering packages in their personal vehicles. After clearing a basic background check, anyone 21 years or older with a driver’s license, car insurance and at least a midsize sedan can pick up a route. They’re also responsible for their own vehicle costs, like fuel, tolls and maintenance.

McCrossan said, “If it was close to Prime [Day], they would see an increase to maybe 40 packages a route. Our average is probably more like 29 packages that they’re delivering in a five-hour timeframe.”

Right now, Woodland Park supports a 40-mile delivery radius in New Jersey, though McCrossan said the jurisdiction map “changes periodically as we rezone to best meet customer demand.”

Up and running

At Woodland Park – a 24/7 operation – the 650 “Amazonians” who work on site include full-time employees and Flex drivers, as well as third-party support for maintenance, janitorial, engineering and IT, according to McCrossan.

“It’s been an exciting 10 months,” said McCrossan, who has launched three other facilities for Amazon, including one in Carteret.

“We’ve also been made a training location, so we’re setting up to host teams that are about to launch a brand-new building. So, we’ll host them for about a month and a half to two months, and they’ll be matched up with my leadership team and we’ll explain how to do things. It’ll give them a hands-on experience operating a building before they go live with theirs,” McCrossan said.

Woodland Park is also the only same-day fulfillment center to feature an Amazon Hub Locker+ location, which allows the public to pick up – or return – items during the daytime hours.

In July, the Woodland Park facility completed its first-ever Prime Day, handling 110,000 packages a day, making it the biggest performer, volume-wise, of all same-day delivery facilities nationwide. Overall, it was the most successful Prime Day yet for Amazon, with total sales for the two-day promotion reaching $12.7 billion – up from $11.9 billion last year.

When it came to getting the site up and running, McCrossan said, “It was a culmination of all my lessons learned and the stakes and successes of the other buildings.”

“Each day, I have a list of key performance indicators that I’m tracking: safety, inbound and outbound. I’m also looking at our cost performance and our quality for delivery purposes,” McCrossan said.

He’s also looking for ways to continue the site’s high marks for employee retention, an effort that involves everything from worker appreciation events, like pizza parties and food trucks, to affinity groups to help give associates a sense of belonging.

As part of the facility’s ramp up, McCrossan said, “We had max hiring, which in this community, is about 50 people a week that we were bringing on board. We did week after week – maybe like 18 weeks of hiring 50 people every single week.”

“I intentionally went for folks that had strong people skills … I felt confident that you could teach the technical aspects of the job … We also put a lot of thoughtfulness into our cultural establishment,” he explained regarding hiring for the local leadership team.

“With this particular building, over 40% of our new hires are from internal referrals. So, a lot of families and friends work here, but if our associates refer someone, they get it at $125 credit to themselves,” McCrossan added.

Along with competitive wages that start at an average of $19.50 an hour, Amazon warehouse workers have access to health care benefits, paid leave and opportunities for continuing education and tuition assistance. The retail giant has gradually raised the average starting pay for its frontline workers in recent years amid growing labor tensions that include unionization efforts by warehouse and delivery workers at several sites.

Making an impact

Woodland Park joins a network of Amazon operations facilities statewide, which includes 22 fulfillment and sortation centers as well as 25 delivery stations.

Its New Jersey footprint also features 23 Whole Foods Market stores and one Amazon Fresh location, as well as several Amazon original movies and series filmed in the state, such as “Always Jane,” “Goodnight Mommy” and “Shelter.”

Over the past 13 years, Amazon has invested $34 billion in New Jersey, including infrastructure and compensation to employees and added $35.1 billion into the state’s GDP, according to the company. Of Amazon’s 1.5 million workers worldwide, about 46,000 of those jobs are in New Jersey, making the company one of the top employers in the state. It has also supported 57,400 indirect jobs, as well as 20,000-plus independent sellers – most of which are small and medium-sized businesses in New Jersey selling on Amazon’s platform.

Additionally, Woodland Park donates, on average, more than $25,000 worth of products each month to local charities such as the Community FoodBank of New Jersey, according to McCrossan.

“It’s a little bit of everything – canned goods, beverage containers and toiletries. A lot of soaps and detergents,” he said. “It could be everything up to an iPad even. We also have pet supplies that will go to pet shelters.”

“Most of the products are ‘slightly blemished,’ which means a product that is dented or in a box that’s torn a bit. For example, the iPad box is torn a little bit, but the iPad is totally intact. I’m not going to sell that to a customer. They would be dissatisfied. But I can just give it to a shelter – they’ll throw out the box and use the iPad,” McCrossan explained.

Open (ware)house

Curious about what happens after you click “place order”?

Well, you can go see. Since 2014, Amazon has offered free tours of its giant fulfillment centers (FCs), giving the public a chance to check out the massive facilities where millions of products are stored, packed and shipped to customers.

Available in multiple locations worldwide – including North America, the U.K., Germany and Italy – tours range from 60 to 90 minutes for an in-person visit to 30 minutes for a virtual visit. Within the U.S., two of those sites are in New Jersey: Robbinsville and Edison.

During the program, a guide shows how products move through FCs in addition to showing off some of Amazon’s technology in action, introducing employees and discussing some of the company’s sustainability and safety efforts.

Launched under Jeff Bezos, the notoriously tight-lipped former CEO, the offering came in the wake of criticism over how warehouse workers are treated, though the company has never said if the tours have anything to do with refuting those claims.

Earlier this year, the company was cited after the U.S. Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration found workers were exposed to ergonomic hazards at seven locations in five states, including two in New Jersey: Bayonne and Logan Township.

Amazon was previously put on notice about “deficient on-site medical practices” back in January 2016 following an investigation of a fulfillment center in Robbinsville.

In commenting on the latest round of citations, Paula Dixon-Roderick, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration area director based in Marlton, said, “The work done by Amazon employees in the company’s fulfillment centers is physically demanding, which makes the availability of proper medical care extremely important.” She said Amazon needs to do more to protect the safety and health of its employees, including implementation of a companywide strategy to address well-known and preventable hazards.

During the summer of 2022, workers at three different New Jersey facilities died, prompting federal work-safety investigators to launch a probe into what occurred at company facilities in Monroe Township, Robbinsville and Carteret. Following the investigations, OSHA did not find any hazards in the warehouses that contributed to the workers’ deaths.

According to Herrington, Amazon continues to take steps to improve working conditions, such as introducing ergonomic equipment and additional training and resources to help workers stay safe on the job.

Altogether, the company has invested more than $1 billion in safety initiatives since 2019 and is committed to spend $550 million this year on prioritizing employee health and safety, he said.

Between 2019 and 2022, Amazon posted a 2% reduction in its U.S. recordable incident rate and a 69% reduction in its lost time incident rate, which are metrics that help gauge the frequency of serious injuries, Herrington shared.

“We are delivering faster speeds on a broader selection, while also improving the overall safety of our employees,” he said. “It’s easy to assume the faster we deliver, the faster employees work – but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The speed improvements we’re making come primarily from placing products closer to customers.

“The people picking, packing, and driving to your house are doing the exact same thing for orders that arrive the same or next day as orders that used to take two or three days. What’s changed is the product is traveling fewer miles and experiencing fewer handoffs between the time you place an order and the time it gets to your door,” he said.

Editor’s note: This article was updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on Oct. 2, 2023, to indicate an average starting wage of $19.50 an hour, not $20.50, as well as to clarify remarks from Drew McCrossan about local team building.

Moving right along

Amazon’s last-mile delivery centers feature hundreds of robotic carriers, like these, and miles of conveyor belts that help workers pick, pack and ship products to customers: