Twenty years of Fulfillment by Amazon: from a used-books experiment to tens of millions of units shipped a day

• Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) began in 2006 with a simple bet: sellers would want to lean on Amazon to store their inventory, and Amazon would handle the picking, packing,shipping, and customer service that came with it, starting with used books, sold for a penny apiece.

• Twenty years and more than 80 billion units later, FBA has grown from seven fulfillment centers and five founding sellers into a global network that moves tens of millions of seller units a day.

• For small businesses, FBA leveled the playing field, giving sellers of all sizes the same delivery speed and reach as the largest retailers—including sub-same-day delivery, which expects to deliver billions of units this year alone—while letting them focus on building their business rather than logistics.

• Today, FBA is a front door to customers everywhere, from the most rural corners of the US to shoppers across the EU, MENA, Japan, and beyond. With new capabilities added every year to help selling partners scale and grow, we’re just getting started.

Ron Reed’s family has been making leather jackets and gloves in Detroit since 1950. For most of that history, reaching a customer meant reaching a brick-and-mortar retail buyer first, the store buyer who decided what made it onto the shelf. For decades, that worked. Reed’s company sold to independent department stores across the Midwest, each one small enough to know its own customers and stock accordingly.

Selling through brick-and-mortar retail got harder every year. By the time Reed had cut his own staff 80% just to survive—years before Amazon ever entered the picture—what he needed wasn’t a bigger warehouse. It was a way to reach customers everywhere and simplify the logistics required to do that efficiently and quickly.

Outside Seattle, Amazon was quietly building fulfillment capacity years ahead of what its retail business needed, with warehouses running well under the traffic their size implied. It was the opening move in a bet only a handful of people at Amazon understood yet. Reed remembers wondering what it was all for. “Why are they building these warehouses?” he says. “Who are they building these warehouses for?” The answer was FBA. Independent sellers would send Amazon their products; Amazon would store them, pick and pack each order, ship it, and handle the customer service and returns that came with it. In 2006, none of that existed yet. Just an idea and an empty building.

I hear stories like Ron’s all the time now. A business owner who spent years focused on a different priority than they preferred, not “how do I make a better product?” but “how do I get it to the customer?” and then found a way to stop solving it alone. But in 2006, nobody was telling those stories yet. There was just a bet.

FBA’s origin started with two groups Amazon was trying to serve, customers and the sellers. The customer wanted more selection than Amazon’s own catalog could offer, the kind only third-party sellers could bring. The seller wanted to reach that customer without building a shipping operation from scratch. Amazon had opened its store to independent sellers back in 2000, but listing a product and getting it to a customer’s door were two different challenges: most sellers were packing boxes in their own garages and answering every customer service email themselves, or paying a premium for the limited third-party fulfillment services available at the time. It was a business that couldn’t survive its owner taking a vacation, because no one else was there to ship the orders. Amazon had a piece of the answer sitting idle: a fulfillment network that ran at full capacity for about five days a year, around the holidays, and well under capacity the rest of the time. An internal proposal connected the two: what if Amazon’s own infrastructure could solve the seller’s problem? Put the customer’s need and the seller’s need together, and FBA was the answer. A seller could sign up, send Amazon the inventory, and let Amazon handle the logistics.

The team needed a first test case, and it picked used books, often listed for a single cent. Used books were the largest seller category in Amazon’s store in 2004, and penny-priced paperbacks were the largest slice of that. It was the biggest opportunity available, and the cheapest place to be wrong. Amazon started with five handpicked sellers, then opened to 50 more by private invite, then to hundreds once Amazon let sellers use their own product barcodes instead of special Amazon-issued labels, opening the door to more categories. For the seller, the economics were thin but real: selling a penny book barely turned a profit, but it was profit. It was enough to prove that handing inventory to Amazon and trusting it to get shipped and paid for fairly could work, even on the least valuable item in the catalog. It forced Amazon to solve a genuinely hard problem: tracking millions of individual, condition-specific used items instead of identical retail inventory. That work became the technical foundation for everything FBA later became.

Back then, this was considered a high-risk play. It took top-level backing to get off the ground at all. Think about what Amazon was asking: a seller would box up their inventory, often their entire working capital, and hand it to a warehouse run by a company most of them had only ever bought books from. That’s not a business decision. That’s a leap of faith. The moment the idea proved itself came almost by accident, when a seller wrote in panic that his inventory had vanished from Amazon’s warehouse. It hadn’t been lost. It had sold out, faster than anyone on the team expected. That’s when we knew: this might actually work.

FBA launched with operations out of seven fulfillment centers, tracking inventory through a single page that updated once a day. What’s followed since is one long build: the same basic promise Amazon made to its first selling partners—send us your inventory, we’ll handle the logistics—getting more capable, more automated, and more global with each passing year.I think about that promise a lot, because it sounds simple. “We’ll handle the logistics” is easy to say. Making it true at scale— across dozens of countries and billions of packages a year—is the work of two decades and counting.

Sellers weren’t the only ones who had to trust the system. Customers did too—specifically, whether they could count on fast, reliable delivery from a seller much smaller than Amazon itself. Once FBA inventory started qualifying for Amazon’s delivery promise and, later, the Prime badge, customers started buying from smaller sellers with newfound confidence. From the moment a customer places an order, FBA can pick, pack, and dispatch products in as little as 4 hours, with an average of 1.3 days across regions worldwide, from the US to the EU, MENA, Japan, and beyond. Getting there took investment: Amazon has spent billions of dollars to keep making delivery faster for customers and sellers alike. With sub-same-day delivery, including 1-hour and 3-hour options, now live, FBA can get inventory from an Amazon warehouse to a customer’s door faster than ever, in just hours. This year alone, we expect to deliver billions of sub-same-day units across our network, and that speed shows up directly in results. When a delivery promise moves from more than four days to two, purchase conversion rates go up by more than 20%. Take that promise from two days to just hours, and conversion can climb another 15% or more.

Sellers choose FBA the way Reed did, not because it’s the only option, but because it kept giving him back the one thing he didn’t have enough of: time to build. Shipping with FBA costs 70% less per unit than comparable premium options from other major carriers, and on average, in the second half of 2025, US sellers who switched to FBA shipped nearly 1.6X the units with over 1.5X the sales on a weekly basis.

Keeping that promise took a decade of behind-the-scenes infrastructure work. The single daily inventory report from FBA’s early years gradually became something closer to a live dashboard, forecasting demand and flagging what needed restocking. By its tenth year, in 2016, that growth was substantial enough that FBA delivered more than 2 billion items for sellers in a single year, a scale nobody on the original seven-warehouse team would have predicted. Today, that same network moves tens of millions of seller units on a single day—more volume than FBA shipped in its entire first three years combined.

Numbers tell part of this story. The businesses that grew up inside FBA tell the rest.

For Reed Wholesale, FBA meant reaching customers he’d never have reached on his own. Someone in rural Alaska, say, needs a pair of gloves in January and can’t wait a week for them. That urgency is exactly what FBA delivered on: fast, reliable shipping to anyone, anywhere, no matter how remote. Reed’s summary of what that meant for a small manufacturer: someone else handling the logistics, so he could focus on the product.

Paula Blankenship, CEO of Heirloom Traditions, who bottles her own paint formula at a small company in Taylorsville, Kentucky, found the same relief from the other side of the country. When demand surged and other carriers fell behind, with packages backed up in their own warehouses, her FBA shipments never stopped moving. Her company has since grown into the largest employer in its small town. Asked what FBA meant to a business her size, she made it sound almost obvious: “Who’s better at logistics than Amazon? So, let’s send them skids of paint and let’s let them figure it out.”

A leather company and a paint company have almost nothing in common, except the same trade-off: less time spent shipping, more time spent building the business they actually set out to build. That trade-off is what I think about when people ask me what FBA does. We don’t make the gloves. We don’t mix the paint. We make it possible for the people who do to spend their days doing that, instead of standing in line at a shipping counter.

The pattern holds at every scale: give a seller one less thing to build themselves, and watch what they build instead. It also leveled a playing field that used to favor whoever had the biggest warehouse. A one-person business can now offer the same delivery speed and Prime badge as a company a thousand times its size. Back in Detroit, Reed has his own answer now to the question he used to ask about all those empty warehouses. “FBA—what it did for small businesses in America,” he said, “I think it saved hundreds of thousands of businesses that otherwise couldn’t compete.”

I have my own version of that feeling. Years after those first sellers packed up their own inventory by hand, I’ve stood in front of a room full of sellers who grew up entirely inside the system we built together. I still wouldn’t have guessed this would happen.

I think about that same arc often, not as history, but as a reminder of what’s still possible. FBA didn’t become what it is because of Amazon. It became what it is because of the sellers who trusted us with their inventory and their brand, year after year, as we figured it out together. Every time I visit a fulfillment center and watch a package move from shelf to truck, I’m watching someone’s livelihood in motion. That never gets old.

We didn’t stop at fulfillment, either, which is just the last leg of the supply chain. We began building out the pieces around FBA: international freight, bulk storage, automated replenishment, fulfillment for orders placed outside Amazon, until sellers had access to a fully managed, end-to-end supply chain. This year, we opened that same infrastructure to any business, not just ours, through a new service called Amazon Supply Chain Services.

Twenty years and over 80 billion units later, we’re still just getting started. Every year, we’re simplifying more of the supply chain, reaching customers in more corners of the world, and building new capabilities so that any seller, anywhere, can focus on what they do best. The question that started FBA—what would it take to earn a seller’s trust?—is the same question we ask ourselves every morning. The answer keeps getting bigger.

For another insider look on how Fulfillment by Amazon has grown and leveled the playing field for sellers, listen to the latest episode of Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, with guest Piyush Saraogi, VP of FBA Product & Technology