Sold on eBay, Shipped by Amazon

[mandy]

Fulfillment by Amazon, in development for the last three years, is one of the oldest efforts in the company’s stable of Web services...

Participants in the program...send their products to Amazon, which stores the items commingled with its own. Amazon ultimately ships them to customers when they are ordered online (and charges the seller a variable fee based partly on the weight of the item and the shipping cost).

Sellers are effectively paying to ship their goods twice. But the program is aimed at small online retailers who have filled up the space in their basements and attics but want to avoid buying and managing their own warehouses.

It also can increase revenues: using Fulfillment by Amazon to sell on Amazon’s third-party marketplace qualifies products for the shipping discounts the company offers buyers, which typically improves sales. But the program’s biggest benefit, Amazon says, is to relieve sellers of one of the most laborious parts of their business — packaging products and getting them to customers promptly...

full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/techno...on.html?em&ex=1177819200&en=06e5cba77311acd4&ei=5087%0A