Fulfillment Solutions: the company has committed to building out its own network
Buy With Prime
Amazon is extending some of the offerings of its Prime membership program to merchants off its platform
Embeds the online retailing giant's payment and fulfillment options onto third-party sites
Merchants will be able to show the Prime logo and offer Amazon's speedy delivery options on products listed on their own websites
40% of Amazon's sales are sold by merchants using Fulfilled-by-Amazon, which means their goods are stored in Amazon's fulfillment centers
Beyond Aggregation
Amazon's business model and differentiation has always been rooted in the real world, which means it is not an Aggregator at all.
This characteristic means that businesses like Apple hardware and Amazon's traditional retail operations bear significant costs in serving the marginal customer (and, in the case of Amazon, have achieved such scale that the service's relative cost of distribution is actually a moat).
Shopify's Predicament and Amazon's Opportunity
Amazon's shipping solution requires the customer to pay with Amazon, which means that every transaction that Amazon processes is one not processed by Shopify.
The implication of Amazon being willing to be a services provider and not an Aggregator is that Amazon is surrendering some number of customer touchpoints to competitors, which is why Shopify needs to think more deeply about advertising
Shopify ought to leverage their control over payment processing to build a competitive conversion-data-driven advertising product
