(2006-09-20) Amazon Fulfillment

Amazon is offering Fulfillment/logistics services. Very handy for Small Retail. What could be a very interesting model is to have Amazon act as an order-intermediary so that I could act as an online retailer, "stocking" my store from lots of items fulfilled through different Amazon sellers, and get a commission on each one. All that distinguishes one Virtual Retail-er from another at that point is taste - humans competing with automated Collaborative Filtering.

Feb'2007: French company Zlio is taking that model. A user signs up, picks a shop name and design template, and then selects the products he or she would like to sell. Users can currently choose from 75 merchants in France and 25 in the US. Since that includes giants like Amazon.com, users have millions of products to choose from. The business model is simple: when customers buy products from a Zlio shop, commission is split between Zlio and the shopkeeper. I'm dubious as to how much money that nets to the "retailer".

Mar'2008: further development of the service (Amazon Web Services).