The Amazon vans you’ve come to know aren’t the only way we deliver smiles.

Your Amazon cart is filled with gifts, household essentials, and maybe even a pick-me-up treat for yourself. You’re done shopping, so you hit “place your order.” But do you know what happens next?

Our incredible employees and partners across our operations network help ensure we can get customers what they want, when they want it, wherever they are.

Here’s how we do it: As soon as a customer places an order, employees at our fulfillment centers get started picking and packing the order. They even gift wrap eligible packages at the customer’s request.

Once the order is packed, employees load the package onto a line haul trailer, where it sits alongside many other customer orders.

portraits and environmental photos of abel tuyisenge, a transportation operations management associate at amazon, as he drives and inspects trucks

Photo by Cory Dewald

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Each truck carries more than 2,000 Amazon boxes.

The package will head to a variety of locations depending on its final destination. In some cases, it will head to one of our Amazon Air sites, where packages are placed into containers called Unit Load Devices (ULDs) and loaded into the aircraft. We now have more than 110 aircraft in our Amazon Air fleet.

Once the aircraft lands at a destination, the package is off to its next step in its journey: a sort center.

Sort centers receive packages from Amazon Air hubs and gateways, as well as fulfillment centers, and are sorted by ZIP code before being transported to delivery stations or a partner facility, such as a U.S. Post Office.

At a delivery station, an Amazon employee sorts the package according to its route, and a delivery driver loads the package onto their delivery vehicle.

An image of a woman, an Amazon Delivery Service Partner, in a work vest standing in front of a delivery van.

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We now have more than 275,000 drivers across our Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program, and hundreds of thousands of Flex drivers worldwide. Join one of our DSP drivers on his route.

When the package is on its way, the customer gets notified and packages are delivered to the customer’s front door or another package pickup point, such as an Amazon Locker.

And, with our latest Alexa feature, customers can directly thank their drivers for making their deliveries. Any time a customer says “Alexa, thank my driver,” the driver who delivered their most recent package will be notified of the customer’s appreciation.

Thank you to all of the wonderful employees and partners across our operations network for delivering for our customers every day.