The Amazon's New Play with Middle-Mile Logistics
Amazon is adding logistics as part of its multi-play strategy, being supported by the one oasis which remains the ecommerce business. As Amazon executes this playbook, it reduces cost for partners and vendors in its marketplace. The brick and mortar retailers do not seem to have any future in Amazon's America.
In recent years, Amazon has attracted wide attention with its effort to become a force in last-mile delivery, from its now ubiquitous delivery vans bearing the company’s smiley-face arrow logo to its experiments with drones.
But the e-commerce giant is also quietly becoming a force in a less visible area: the trucking of goods between Amazon warehouse facilities, manufacturing centers and ports, a part of shipping known as middle-mile delivery. The Information has learned that by the end of 2019 Amazon was shipping more than two-thirds of the freight between company facilities in the U.S. using a new Amazon program that helps small independent trucking companies book jobs. That has allowed Amazon to wean much of its business off big third-party freight brokers, which were hauling the vast majority of its freight just two years earlier.