After years of will they? Won’t they? Posturing, Amazon earlier this year confirmed they would be opening operations in Australia and today they’ve taken the first steps announcing the first fulfilment centre in Australia.
The 24,000 square foot fulfillment centre will open in Dandenong South, with Amazon’s first Director of Operations in Australia Robert Bruce saying ‘We are thrilled to be creating hundreds of new roles in Dandenong South’. Mr Bruce said that this is ‘just the start’, with Amazon looking to bring ‘thousands of new jobs to Australia and millions of dollars of investment’.
The operations centre is located in ‘Pellicano’s M2 Industry Park’ in Dandenong South, which the company says will give them easy access to the South Gippsland Highway, Monash Highway and Eastlink – major arterial roads in the area.
As well as their online operations, Amazon intends to open up their Amazon Marketplace which they say will allow ‘thousands of Australian businesses to sell at home and abroad’.
If you’re on the lookout for work, the Amazon.jobs website is currently listing a load of positions. This includes positions for digital services like a Marketing Manager who will work to expand Amazon’s Digital Music service in Australia. Amazon already offers their digital video service Prime Video, as well as Kindle books and Amazon Android Apps marketplace in Australia, but this digital side of things looks set to explode with this launch as well.
Mr Bruce said ‘We will be focusing on offering our Australian customers low prices on a great selection of products and can’t wait to get started.’ and we can’t wait to start using their service. We’ll be following this launch quite closely, and we’re hoping to see what Amazon services eventually launch here in Australia.
My mate Gerry (“c’mon govt, put a GST On everything”) Harvey said last month he wasn’t worried because Amazon haven’t even found a site yet, and could take many years to do all the paperwork. Wonder if he’s worried now?
Everyone is focused on how this will bring competition to retail but it just occurred to me how much this will affect eBay.
good point, a lot of the time cheap electronics or things like kitchen gizmos are just stuff chinese importers push on Ebay, this will be a big corp putting lots of individuals out of business but obviously they will also *employ* people and having the sketchy quality stuff come from Amazon makes any returns or exchange safer for the customer so probably an overall win-win
Woohoo!