David Cuthbert
Nov 2 · 4 min read

Amazon acknowledged but would not explain why tracking is assigned only after a product has left a fulfillment center.

Ex-Amazonian here (developer, not on the operations side, but had friends who were).

Your shipment — the box containing your items — starts at a fulfillment center. The tracking starts in the SLAM machine (scan, label, apply, manifest), just before your package is put on the loading dock. Anything that happens beforehand is not “your” shipment. A box/pallet arriving at a fulfillment center (from a distribution center, either Amazon-owner, manufacturer-owner, or manufacturer representative-owned) will have a variety of items.

Items in this box are not ready-to-ship. What you order from a distribution center, what you get, and what you’re billed for can be maddeningly different. It can be horribly sloppy; a fulfillment center received a pallet wrapped in plastic with a squirrel inside one holiday season. (Thankfully, the squirrel was able to be released unharmed.)

Finally, one of the interesting quality checks Amazon introduced was weighing the packages before sending it out the door. This is technically redundant — Amazon knows the weight of the items and the box, and that’s what is applied on the shipping label. But it catches a lot of errors, like small products falling out of the box before it’s wrapped and, in one case, a batch of DVDs from a manufacturer that were just empty cases (due to a manufacturing error).

You definitely won’t find any tracking information before the fulfillment center — Amazon doesn’t want you seeing that, as it’s a large part of its competitive advantage. But you can get a big picture (just not the exact point-to-point details) by reasoning it out:

  1. Time literally equals money — Amazon optimizes Free Cash Flow, and wants to ship the item as early as possible before it has to pay for it (18 days on average, according to that article)
  2. Every handling point for an item (moved from one vehicle to another) incurs a cost. Once an item lands at a port-of-entry, minimize the number of distribution centers it has to go through (to zero, if you can).
  3. Shipping by air is much more expensive than by ground, by roughly an order of magnitude.
  4. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that I don’t want to be a vendor for Amazon. Sure, you’ll have hefty revenues, but your costs will equal (or exceed) your revenues — as FedEx has learned. Until a few years ago, Amazon relied on external companies for all of its shipping needs, until they couldn’t provide the routes they wanted. Now I can’t get around Seattle without seeing the Prime trucks and Prime Air planes. I suspect the decision to enter into becoming a shipping company was a reluctant one forced by vendors not being able to keep up with the growth of Amazon.
  5. Inside Amazon, you can immediately make anyone defensive by posing the question: “But does it scale?” To make things work at Amazon’s scale, you need automation — a lot of automation. You can’t put people in charge of making shipping and routing decisions at Amazon’s scale; even if you could hire that many people, a single bad snowstorm will set you back weeks. It’s all algorithms, trying to find the optimal path that prioritizes getting the package to the end-customer by the promised date, then by the cheapest method possible.

Have you ever ordered an item, selected No-Rush shipping, and it seems like Amazon just sat on it for a week and then sent it out a day before it was promised to arrive? There’s a few things that are going on behind the scenes (this is from my observation and decoding of some shipping labels):

  1. Amazon is sitting on your order, hoping you’ll order more items and they’ll be able to combine them in a single box, saving on costs. I’ve done No-Rush shipping for batteries on a Friday night; on Saturday, I had a computer part die on me, so I ordered it with next-day shipping. On Sunday, I had a box — with the computer part and the batteries.
  2. Amazon doesn’t have the items near you, or wants to ship them out to other customers sooner. The extra delay allows them to move your item from a distribution center (or, sometimes, another fulfillment center) to a fulfillment center closer to you. Then it arrives at your nearby fulfillment center, and they package it up for you.

I never discovered why my AmazonBasics batteries exploded.

I’m not a battery expert, but I am an electronics hobbyist who has let the magic smoke out of things more than I care to admit. Batteries going haywire means heat, and heat means a short circuit. My hunch is one or more batteries were damaged somewhere (could’ve been at the manufacturer, in shipping, anywhere) and short was finally triggered when you brought it into your kitchen. An infrared (FLIR) heat camera might be able to tell you if others are suspect; electricians use this to look for wiring issues before they cause fires.

While they can still cause a serious fire (and I would keep them outside of the house at this point just to be on the safe side), the good news is alkaline and carbon cell batteries aren’t as insidious as lithium ion.

Thanks for the article!

David Cuthbert

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I am a Solutions Architect at AWS who swims in Puget Sound, a die-hard geek, father and husband. Opinions here are my own, not AWS’.

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