Amazon Australia director of operations Craig Fuller: ‘By expanding our operations there we can ensure more customers can get their orders more quickly as we lead into the holiday season.’
Deliveries have started rolling out the door at Amazon’s latest delivery centre near Melbourne Airport at Tullamarine.
The site’s launch comes just ahead of the retailer’s ubiquitous Prime Day, in which more than 150 million members worldwide shop for bargains, with the local version running for two days this week to capitalise on offshore deals.
For Craig Fuller, charged with running the US online retail behemoth’s local operations, it’s a week of extended hours and high volume deliveries.
“It is a surge in sales but it is not as big as Black Friday, simply because it’s targeted for Prime members,” he says, though that online shopping super sales day in late November also looms.
This partly explains why the company has just opened the airport delivery hub. Rather than shipping in products from offshore, the hub receives parcels from a larger fulfilment centre in Melbourne’s southern suburb of Dandenong South and forwards them to the northern and western suburbs.
Fuller compares the model to a “hub and spoke” style of operation and it adds to another delivery centre in the suburb of Mulgrave. The centre is also in keeping with the retailer’s strategy in Sydney where it has opened a new delivery distribution hub at Frenchs Forest, adding to delivery centres at Regents Park and Botany.
It is also building a robotics fulfilment centre at Kemps Creek in Sydney’s west, near the planned Western Sydney airport, adding to its existing centre in Moorebank.
The race for the online retail dollar is sharpening with local rivals nipping at the US group’s heels, and bricks and mortar retailers have been forced by the pandemic to switch to online sales while their shops are either closed or thinly patronised as customers stay away from shopping centres.
The latest airport station is part of Amazon‘s strategy to have more last mile centres to ensure its parcels arrive fastest, with the new 3500 sq m delivery station in the replacing a smaller airport facility launched earlier this year.
The new site is more than ten times larger and will create about 30 operational jobs and contractor roles with Amazon Flex.
“By expanding our operations there we can ensure more customers can get their orders more quickly as we lead into the holiday season,” says Fuller, director of operations for Amazon Australia.
He acknowledges the importance of online shopping, particularly while the city is locked down.
Amazon is in talks to find more delivery hubs and he says there’s lots of good choices in Melbourne, particularly as the industrial areas of Derrimut and Truganina are developed out.
“For us the location is the most important thing,” he says, adding the retailer is “agnostic” about the landlords it deals with. But the imperative is to find more sites.
“People are obviously shopping more online,” Fuller says.
He says there has been a shift in industry comparisons of online shopping, where Australia was lagging compared to Britain or the US. But the pandemic has spurred existing trends and accelerated customer “exploration and possible adoption”. ”We’re hoping that will stay,” Fuller says.
