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January 01, 2006
Amazon Customers Order 108 Million Items During Holiday Season
Here's are some facts to start the MIS class this term:
On December 12, 2005, Amazon processed 3.6 million order items, an average of 41 items per second.
On their peak day during the holiday season, Amazon shipped 2.7 million units, an average of 31 items per second.
Think about that! Amazon has an an infrastructure that allows them to ship 31 items per second. To more than 200 different countries. And reliably. They claim 99 percent of all holiday orders (with 108 million items) shipped on time!
It boggles my mind to consider the infrastructure behind those statistics. The facilities, the inventories, the alliances with transportation vendors, and the information systems. What kind of an information system does it take to ship 2.7 million units from distribution centers located around the world to customers in 200 countries? Think of the web farm needed just to process the 3.6 million order items. Of course to decide to order, customers had to search the Amazon database for the products they wanted. How many html servers did it take to process those requests? And how many database servers did it take obtain the requested data? I was out there buying during the holiday season. I didn't notice a slowdown in performance. How did they do THAT?
What a story!
Posted by DavidK at January 1, 2006 04:42 PM | Permalink