3rd new Amazon fulfilment centre announced this month

Amazon are showing no signs of slowing down with their roll out of new Amazon fulfilment centre real estate with three new US FC‘s announced in May.

The three new Amazon FCs will be located in Ohio, Tucson and Oklahoma. Combined, the three FCs will add over 2,310,000 square feet of storage for Amazon and 4,500 jobs will be created – around 1,500 at each location.

Amazon’s growth is staggering, for any other retailer to open three new FCs and add a couple of million square footage of storage would be notable, but for Amazon that’s just one month worth of expansion in just one country. These aren’t their only ongoing expansion plans either, just the new ones announced during the month of May.

Amazon is continuing to grow their retail operations at an exponential rate but sales by third party merchants are growing even faster and generally over 50% of sales are from merchants. Amazon do like to control the buyer experience and much of their FC growth is to store and ship products owned by merchants rather than their own merchandise. They have a relentless drive to get goods ever closer to the end customer which is why there are no signs that they’ll slow down their acquisition of real estate any time soon.

Here in the UK, Amazon took on an additional 4,000,000 square feet of warehouse space in 2017 – roughly five times that of Lidl who were the next largest retailer by expansion.