A new service unveiled by Amazon on Monday gives businesses of every kind and scale access to the company’s freight, distribution, fulfillment, and parcel shipping infrastructure — not just third-party sellers on its marketplace. UPS and FedEx now have a new rival to contend with: the service, known as Amazon Supply Chain Services, positions the e-commerce company squarely in their market, TechCrunch reports.
Eligible customers span a wide range of sectors, from healthcare and automotive to manufacturing and retail. Amazon identified four companies — Procter & Gamble, 3M, Lands’ End, and American Eagle Outfitters — as early adopters of the service.
The four early customers are each using different parts of the network. Procter & Gamble is using Amazon’s freight services to transport raw materials to production facilities and move finished goods across its distribution network. 3M is using the freight services to move products from manufacturing sites to distribution centers. Lands’ End is drawing on a unified inventory pool within Amazon’s network to fill orders across multiple sales channels. American Eagle Outfitters is using Amazon’s parcel shipping network to deliver online orders directly to customers.
Core offerings include ocean, air, ground, and rail freight; distribution and fulfillment that allows businesses to store and position inventory across a single network; and parcel shipping with two-to-five-day delivery speeds and seven-day-a-week service, the company said.
“Amazon is bringing the infrastructure, intelligence, and scale of its supply chain services — proven over decades — to businesses everywhere, much like Amazon Web Services did for cloud computing,” Peter Larsen, VP of Amazon Supply Chain Services, said in a statement.
Amazon drew an explicit parallel to the origins of AWS, its cloud computing division. The company built AWS to serve its own internal needs and then opened it to outside customers — a model it says it is now replicating with logistics. Independent sellers have shipped more than 80 billion units through Fulfillment by Amazon since 2006, and Amazon said the results from those sellers gave it confidence to extend the service more broadly. Sellers using Amazon’s end-to-end supply chain solutions see almost 20% higher sales, the company said.
Amazon has been expanding its supply chain software offerings alongside the logistics push. Earlier this year, AWS announced an agentic AI product for managing supply chain disruptions, called Amazon Connect Decisions, which draws on more than 25 supply chain models developed internally. That product, aimed at helping companies diagnose disruptions and weigh responses, is separate from the physical logistics network Amazon is now opening to outside businesses.
