Ahead of festive sales, Amazon expands storage and sorting infrastructure

As the festive season approaches amidst a challenging environment on account of the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon’s India arm has added two new fulfillment centres in Hyderabad. The additions take the Seattle headquartered ecommerce giant’s storage capacity to 4.5 million cubic feet spread across four fulfilment centres in Telangana.

“This expansion will help sellers offer a wider selection and enable faster deliveries of customer orders within the region and neighbouring states ahead of the upcoming festive season,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Amazon started its operations in India with Telangana, which continues to be home to the company’s largest fulfilment center in the country. 

“This network expansion will help create thousands of work opportunities and will further help us support small and medium businesses in the region to fulfil their customer orders seamlessly,” Prakash Kumar Dutta, Director of Fulfilment Centres & Supply Chain, Amazon India, said.

The specialised fulfilment center  in Telangana will store thousands of products in the large appliances category consisting of air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and furniture. The other center will cater to customer demand for products such as smartphones, consumer electronics, appliances, fashion and consumables, the company said.

Amazon India also recently expanded an existing ‘sort centre’ to offer an overall sortation area of more than one lakh square feet in Telangana.

Keeping in mind the upcoming festive season, last week it announced the expansion of its ‘sort centre’ network. It plans to launch five new sort centres in Visakhapatnam, Farukhnagar, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Ahmedabad.

“Along with the new centres, Amazon India will also expand 8 existing sort centres to increase overall sortation area to 2.2 million square feet, across 19 states,” the company said.

The sort centers sort customer packages before they are shipped to delivery stations. The sortation happens based on the location and mode of transportation of the package to customers.

In July, Amazon had launched 10 new fulfilment centres in India and expanded seven existing ones.