Addresses for Amazon’s South African marketplace fulfilment centres leak online

Amazon plans to have at least one fulfilment centre in Johannesburg and another in Cape Town, a document on its Carrier Central webpage for South Africa shows.

Reddit user u/Juanpees said he found the spreadsheet containing the information while perusing the Amazon Carrier Central page for South Africa.

MyBroadband was able to locate the file in the same way the user described — on the Amazon Carrier Central page for South Africa, via a link labelled “FC Address File”.

In addition to the addresses, the spreadsheet shows that the fulfilment centres can handle 7-ton trucks for palletised deliveries, with a maximum pallet height of 160cm.

Both locations will also be able to accept deep-sea import containers, according to the document.

The first two columns from the spreadsheet are reproduced below:

Amazon has not officially announced its plan to launch a marketplace in South Africa, but it’s an open secret at this stage.

MyBroadband first reported that Amazon was looking for warehouse space in South Africa in January 2022.

Then, in June, Business Insider reported that it had seen leaked documents confirming that the ecommerce and cloud computing giant plans to launch third-party marketplaces in South Africa and Nigeria.

Amazon’s Prime membership programme would also reportedly be available in South Africa shortly after launch.

Codenamed “Project Fela”, Amazon had planned to launch in South Africa by February and in Nigeria by April 2023.

However, well-placed sources told MyBroadband sister publication Daily Investor in January that the Nigerian launch had been paused and the South African marketplace delayed.

Mass lay-offs at Amazon called into question whether the South African marketplace would go ahead at all. However, sources close to Amazon’s South African operations said the company still planned to launch.

They said that because of the challenging environment, the South African marketplace launch was delayed until the third or fourth quarter of 2023.

MyBroadband also previously learned that Amazon is in discussions with courier companies and local fast-moving consumer goods retailers.

Further confirming that it was launching a local marketplace, Amazon advertised two management-level jobs for the “ZA marketplace” in August 2022.

These were for a strategic accounts manager and a general manager.

MyBroadband asked Amazon for comment about the fulfilment centre addresses posted on its website, and it did not respond by publication time.

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