Amazon is letting merchants using its Multichannel Fulfillment service offer Prime delivery directly on their own websites, with no added cost to retailers or shoppers.
Is Prime on your own site a gift for mid-sized retailers or a Trojan horse that makes them even more dependent on Amazon? Chris Walton argues it might actually be a little bit of both.
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Transcripts
Speaker A:
Amazon is letting US merchants that use its multi channel fulfillment service offer prime delivery directly on their own websites at no added cost to them or their shoppers.
Speaker A:
According to chainstorage, mcf, Multi Channel Fulfillment, that's another cool acronym, is part of Amazon Supply Chain Services, which I guess is ascs, the third party logistics platform Amazon launched in May.
Speaker A:
Retailers don't need to change their payment processing, order management or store policies.
Speaker A:
And prime membership is verified after checkout, so shoppers don't need to log into Amazon.
Speaker A:
All right, producer Ella, I have no idea which way this one's going to go either.
Speaker A:
Put me on the spot once again.
Speaker B:
Okay, we're coming in hot with question number four.
Speaker B:
A&M wants to know, is prime on your own site a gift for mid sized retailers or a Trojan horse that makes them even more dependent on Amazon?
Speaker A:
Oh my God, a Trojan horse.
Speaker A:
Oh man.
Speaker A:
I guess if you put a gun in my head, I think the answer to me is it's neither one.
Speaker A:
Or actually maybe it's kind of both.
Speaker A:
So I guess, I guess what I'm saying it's, it's a dessert topping and a floor wax to quote, to quote the great Dan Aykroyd.
Speaker A:
And the reason I say that it kind of is both the brands and the midsize retailers get the benefit of offering their customers the confidence of Amazon's shipping service.
Speaker A:
And Amazon, which has always been what I call an infrastructuralist going back to the first headline, keeps their drug in the arm of these very same retailers that much longer.
Speaker A:
And it also, which is important, positions Amazon to do quite well in the years ahead defensively against the LLMs.
Speaker A:
Because the one thing as I think about this story that I think all of us need to keep in mind that we should never forget, especially if you follow retail as closely as we do for the past 10 years of doing this.
Speaker A:
Past 10 years.
Speaker A:
Can you believe we're in 10 years of doing OmniTalk?
Speaker A:
Ella, it's crazy, but in the past 10 years there's one thing I've learned never to discount and that is that Amazon is, is as smart as they come.
Speaker A:
They are always thinking years ahead.
Speaker A:
So they've likely scenario planned all the moves that the industry could make and they're now placing their chips on the board proportionally to come out standing on the right side of things.
Speaker A:
At the end of the day, we never should forget that, that Amazon always plays the long game.
Speaker A:
And that's the move here.
Speaker A:
I think this is the move to say we're going to be the infrastructure for retail.
Speaker A:
Regardless of how people start interacting as agentic AI comes into the fore.
