Amazon has been one of the largest internet stores for many years. Founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994 as an internet store to sell books, it is today one of the largest companies in the world that has made the manager one of the richest people in the world.
Amazon’s business is diversified into three parts: the sale of products in its online store, cloud services with AWS and streaming content with Amazon Prime Video, including the production of films and series.
But Amazon took a long time to reach Spain. Officially, the company arrived in the iberian peninsula on september 15, 2011 with its first local distribution center and the opening of its store with the “.es” domain.
There were a few Amazon users in Spain who bought directly on the US or UK websites, but the official arrival of Amazon marked a milestone in electronic commerce, since the giant arrived with capital letters.
Amazon arrived in 2011 and it didn’t take long for it to be the number one online store in the country. By 2020, almost a decade later, the Spanish version became the seventh marketplace most important of all the countries where it is present, behind France, India, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and the USA.
Amazon’s story in Spain is also one of how a foreign giant can crush local competition, as well as legal problems with self-employed delivery drivers and labor problems due to the intense work of its distribution centers.
Distribution centers, Amazon’s cornerstone for fast shipping
Amazon has more distribution centers near large urban areas. For example, in Madrid they already have 13 stores. Catalonia has 10, the Valencian Community has one in Paterna and another in Alicante and in Andalusia they have two centers in Seville and another in Malaga.
But not all distribution centers are the same. There are different types depending on the needs of each area.
Logistics centers without sorting work are the largest buildings, where the largest and most voluminous orders are prepared.
- logistics centerswhere orders are packed and shipped
- sorting centers where customer orders are sorted for final delivery.
- reception centers they are the centers where all the large orders from manufacturers and other stores are received.
- specialized centers They are the ones that usually support in times of great demand, such as Christmas, Black Friday or Prime Day.
- logistics stations They are the places where orders are prepared for direct delivery.
- Urban logistics centers They are the fast distribution centers, specially designed for Amazon Fresh, the supermarket service with perishable products.
In the world of e-commerce, especially in companies that focus on fast delivery and low prices, delivery times are essential. And this can only be guaranteed with agile logistics and close to the customer.
That’s why Amazon has so many logistics centers spread out near big cities and some smaller ones in large towns.
The rapid expansion of Amazon in Spain has also created legal problems and even strikes.
Amazon
The great expansion in the world of Amazon logistics in Spain has also caused problems, especially labor.
One of the big scandals in Spain was the use of self-employed drivers to deliver packages in the first years of the company’s life through the Flex service. Amazon offered routes at certain times of the day through a mobile application and the self-employed, with their own vehicle, could choose which one was best for them.
Amazon’s solution was to create local subcontractors that hire delivery drivers using their own fleet of vans. But at the beginning of 2023 the company was condemned by the Spanish justice for using more than 2,000 independent distributors when it should have hired them.
In 2018, Amazon experienced one of its worst reputational moments with a strike in several distribution centers, which left shipments in Madrid almost paralyzed, where it has more of these centers.
One of the most recent strikes, in Barcelona in 2023, is related to the closure of one of its distribution centers in Martorelles, where 800 people worked.
Amazon Prime Video, the “free” streaming service that moves millions
It’s surprising that one of Amazon’s flagship products, its Prime Video streaming service, is virtually free when integrated into your Prime subscription, among other perks.
Amazon Prime Video is a huge streaming video business – which arrived in Spain in December 2016 – and which is one of the compelling reasons for maintaining the subscription service.
It is one of the largest streaming platforms and one of Jeff Bezos’s strongest bets before leaving Amazon’s leadership.
So important is Prime Video to Amazon’s future that they managed to close the acquisition of Metro Goldwyn Mayer for $8.4 billion.
Amazon Fresh, the Amazon supermarket with fast deliveries
As part of Amazon’s services in Spain, the company launched Amazon Pantrya counterpart to its version in other countries such as the US or the UK, for the purchase and delivery of day-to-day household products, such as food, beverages, home and personal care.
The service had a shipping cost of 4.99 euros and was offered as a complementary service, but on June 30, 2020, the service closed to introduce these products directly into the Amazon general catalog.
Amazon opened a year later, in February 2021one of its biggest bets in the sale of local products, Amazon Fresh.
The service offers same-day delivery of grocery items, including perishable and refrigerated items. Amazon Fresh is Amazon’s own supermarket, although it also has Día brand products.
It is available to Amazon Prime customers and is delivered in two-hour slots at no cost for orders of 30 euros in Valencia, Seville and Zaragoza, and 50 euros in other cities (Alicante, Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid and Malaga).
Future of Amazon in Spain: more commitment to the cloud and technology center
Among Amazon’s future strategies in Spain is to expand its AWS data centers (Amazon Web Servicesfor its acronym in English), its service in the cloud and that today is a bigger business than the store itself.
In 2022 AWS opened a data region, that is, data centers that developers of internet applications and services can choose to be closer to their customers in Spain and Europe.
The data centers are located in Villanueva de Gállego and El Burgo de Ebro in Zaragoza and in Huesca.
In addition, the company opened in 2021 the European Innovation Center for Operations, a facility where Amazon workers can create new safety solutions for work, although they are more focused on the development of distribution center robots.
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