What happens after you hit “place your order”? Follow the journey and meet some of the people who help get your orders to you. Your Amazon cart is filled with gifts, household essentials, and maybe even a treat for yourself. You’re done shopping, so you hit “place your order.” But do you know what happens next?

Amazon’s incredible employees and partners across their operations network ensure they 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 Amazon’s fulfillment centers start 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.

Each truck carries more than 2,000 Amazon boxes.

The package will head to various locations depending on its final destination. In some cases, it will go to one of our Amazon Air sites, where packages are placed into containers called Unit Load Devices (ULDs) and loaded into the aircraft. Amazon now have over 110 aircraft in their Amazon Air fleet. Once the aircraft lands, the package moves to its next step: 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, like 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. They now have more than 275,000 drivers across their Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program, and hundreds of thousands of Flex drivers worldwide. Join one of Amazon’s 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, like an Amazon Locker.

With Amazon 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.