Inside Amazon's technology test-bed

After you negotiate airport style security, and walk by the posters advertising free flu jabs, the first impressions on entering Amazon’s high-tech warehouse near Baltimore are the noise and the lack of people.

The din comes from miles of conveyors that carry the many thousands of packages that leave each ‘fulfilment centre’ - , as Amazon dubs its warehouses - every day.

A product’s journey through Amazon’s system begins with what at first glance appears to be a somewhat counter-intuitive approach to product stowing – whereby inventory entering the warehouse is deliberately randomly distributed by teams of “Stowers” into bins within 2-metre-high storage pods carried by mobile robot drive units.

Such a chaotic approach to storing inventory - dubbed random stow by Amazon - would have once been unthinkable. But by randomly distributing items in this way and using an overarching IT system known as Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring together  the data on every single item within the system, pickers are able to locate products far more quickly than if they had to visit a dedicated shelf for each product.