Amazon is opening a new fulfillment center in Kansas as the e-commerce giant plots more ways to deliver packages to customer doorsteps.
According to the Kansas City Star, the new 822,104-square-foot facility will be located in Edgerton, Kan. and will create around 1,000 full-time jobs. Amazon previously operated a 915,000-square-foot warehouse in Coffeyville, Kan., but it was shuttered in 2015.
Amazon uses its fulfillment centers as warehouses for its own inventory as well as for third-party merchants who want sell to Amazon’s estimated 50 million Prime members. Prime members pay $99 annually to get anything from toilet paper to diapers to books delivered to them in two days or less.
Increasingly, these orders are being delivered in a matter of hours through Amazon’s Prime Now service, one part of the company’s aggressive strategy for getting goods to customer’s doorsteps as fast as possible.
Outside sellers now account for more than 45% of total number of items sold on Amazon, a 5% uptick since January. That means that the e-commerce giant likely needs to create more space and logistics for these goods.
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It’s worth noting that the fulfillment business, which debuted in 2006, is costly for Amazon. In the third quarter of 2015, Amazon’s fulfillment expenses increased 22% to $3.2 billion.
According to a report from 2015, Amazon was operating 104 North American fulfillment centers and warehouses and 69 facilities outside North America.