The reports of Amazon’s new Shipping With Amazon (SWA) service shows signals the online titan wants to disrupt B2B ecommerce, as well as B2C.
“They’re making large investments in B2B commerce and if businesses want to compete and maintain their market share, they’ll need to offer an online buying option as well,” Ray Grady, president and chief customer officer at CloudCraze told our sister publication Multichannel Merchant. “It’s important for businesses to own the ecommerce experience and the customer from end to end and not outsource or give up margins to Amazon. This move should serve as a call to action for B2Bs.”
Scott Webb, president of Avionos, told MCM that B2B companies have been slower to adopt supply chain innovations because they typically work with larger products more deeply rooted in brick-and-mortar commerce. But SWA may change that.
“As Amazon’s shipping expands, we’re seeing online and offline further converge in B2B and a more streamlined digital process emerge that will ultimately lead to greater efficiencies and customer satisfaction” he says. “We can expect this initial rollout to serve as a basis for improving the offering, with Amazon taking an iterative approach as they reach new geographies.”
According to published reports, the SWA service, which would handle shipments from third-party Amazon sellers, is set to launch in Los Angeles later this year, following a 2017 trial run.
Last year, Amazon generated an estimated 1.2 billion shipments in the U.S., according to supply chain consultants MWPVL International as cited by the Wall Street Journal. Most of those shipments were delivered by USPS, UPS and FedEx.
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