If Amazon becomes your 3PL, your margins just got a new landlord

Primary Audience: West Midlands DTC founder

Summary: Amazon opening its end-to-end supply chain network to all businesses is a reminder that logistics is becoming a product. If you outsource the thinking as well as the work, you’ll pay for it in margin and customer experience.

Suggested Posting Day: Thursday

If Amazon becomes your 3PL, your margins just got a new landlord.

I’m not anti-Amazon.

I’m anti-founders signing away their delivery promise because the dashboard looks tidy.

Amazon has just put a name on what they’ve been building for years: Amazon Supply Chain Services — freight, warehousing, fulfilment and parcel shipping, offered to businesses across all sales channels.

On paper it sounds brilliant.

In reality, you’re handing one supplier your inbound, your stock, your pick/pack rules and your customer’s last mile. That’s not “outsourcing”. That’s letting someone else design your business.

Mini-example from the Birmingham end of things:

A local brand I work with started pushing volume through a marketplace fulfilment option because it was ‘easy’. Returns got slower, customer service got noisier, and the real cost only showed up once they tried to run a promo across their own site at the same time. Different SLAs. Different cut-off times. Same customer expectations.

Practical takeaway:

Before you move anything, write a one-page “delivery spec” for your brand — cut-offs, weekend rules, returns promise, packaging rules, and what happens when stock is wrong. Then judge any provider against that.

If a platform can’t meet your spec without hand-waving, it’s not a partner — it’s a dependency.

Would you let one company control your ads, your checkout, and your customer support in one go? Why do it with your fulfilment?