This week there was a great interview (subscription required) with George Jones CEO of Borders in the Wall Street Journal where he discusses the company’s decision to move their Ecommerce business away from Amazon and strike out on their own.
Regarding the original outsourcing of their e-commerce site to Amazon he said:
“The decision to let Amazon do our e-commerce site was made years ago when there were completely different economics involved. There weren’t the options for third-party fulfillment that there are now.”
That is an interesting point for a lot of organizations that have been postponing an e-commerce play or have completely outsourced their site to another company. Third Party Logistics providers have continued to build up their competencies in e-commerce fulfillment and additional value add services giving companies more options to realize savings and drive revenue. This opens up a lot of new possibilities; especially for business initiatives that didn’t make sense just a few years ago.