Amazon.com thinks its next AWS is in its warehouses.
The e-commerce giant is trying to do for logistics what its Amazon Web Services unit did for cloud computing with a new business called Amazon Supply Chain Services.
The company over two decades grew AWS from an internal effort to better manage its technology systems into the largest service of its kind. Now, it hopes to do the same with its sprawling global supply chain by opening up its network to more business customers—including those that don’t sell on Amazon’s retail marketplace.
“We first built this network over 20 years for ourselves. We then made it available to Amazon sellers,” said Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services. “Now we’re making it available to any business of any shape or size.”
The nation’s largest company by revenue on Monday is announcing the launch of Amazon Supply Chain Services, a centralized place for companies from consumer-goods manufacturers to apparel retailers to hire Amazon for services such as fulfillment, ocean and air shipping, and truck transportation.
The move to tie together all of its supply-chain services in one place in effect officially makes Amazon a third-party logistics provider, or 3PL, competing with the likes of transportation and warehousing giants such as DSV, DHL Group and Kuehne + Nagel International. It positions Amazon to take a bigger bite out of a global market for third-party logistics services that is estimated at more than $1.3 trillion, according to research group Armstrong & Associates.
“We think it’s a very large opportunity,” Larsen said.
Amazon over nearly three decades has assembled a supply chain spanning the globe with warehouses, planes, trucks and delivery vehicles. Its last-mile delivery service has grown to become the nation’s largest parcel carrier by volume, ahead of United Parcel Service, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service, according to parcel-analytics firm ShipMatrix. The company has built its own logistics technology to forecast demand, plan inventory and route freight.
Amazon has sold fulfillment services to companies that list goods on its retail marketplace for 20 years. Third-party seller services accounted for about 24% of the company’s total revenue last year with $172 billion in net sales.
Those services propelled Amazon to become the world’s largest third-party logistics company based on gross logistics revenue in 2025, according to Armstrong & Associates. The company wasn’t even in the top 10 of that list a decade ago, said Evan Armstrong, chief executive of Armstrong & Associates.
But the services to date have largely been offered piecemeal, allowing companies to hire Amazon specifically for e-commerce order fulfillment, or for shipping freight, but not for their full supply chain needs.
“They have warehousing operations, they have transportation-management operations, they have international air and ocean operations, and they don’t have a completely coordinated 3PL sell, even though they’re the largest 3PL when you add it all up,” Armstrong said.
Its new business will stitch all that together in one place not just for e-commerce merchants and retailers, but also for companies shipping goods business-to-business such as healthcare companies and auto-parts manufacturers. Amazon said costs will vary based on the services businesses use.
The service can fulfill orders placed through platforms that compete with Amazon’s own marketplace, from marketplaces run by Walmart and fast-fashion retailer Shein, to e-commerce platform Shopify and social-media app TikTok.
Customers that have been piloting Amazon Supply Chain Services include consumer-goods giant Procter & Gamble, which is using Amazon’s freight network to ship raw materials to production facilities. Manufacturer 3M is using its freight services to move products from manufacturing sites to distribution centers worldwide.
Apparel retailer Lands’ End is using Amazon warehouses to fulfill orders on its own website as well on Amazon and other sites. And apparel brands American Eagle and Aerie are relying on Amazon’s parcel service to handle final-mile delivery to consumers.
More companies have outsourced their logistics services over the past two decades as a way to better control costs and manage potential supply-chain disruptions. Armstrong & Associates recently estimated 94% of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. now work with at least one third-party logistics provider, up from 72% in 2006.
The turn to third-party logistics providers has also been driven by rising customer expectations for speedy home delivery thanks to Amazon’s two-day delivery promise for its Prime members. Other retailers over the years have raced to build out networks to match that speed.
“The faster you can get something to a customer, the more they’re going to buy,” said Daniel Stanton, founder of supply-chain consulting firm Mr. Supply Chain. Amazon’s new service “has the potential to level the playing field so that everybody can be delivering their stuff to their customers with the level of service that we’ve all come to expect from Amazon.”
Companies outsourcing logistics operations often have questions about data privacy, industry experts say. Amazon has been accused in the past of using nonpublic information from merchants on its marketplace to compete against them, allegations the company has denied.
Larsen said the company tightly controls who can access seller data. Amazon prohibits using data from its supply-chain customers to make decisions for its own marketplace. He added that the number of companies already using Amazon to fulfill online orders on rival marketplaces is proof of customer trust.
“We’ve already got hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers using these Amazon supply-chain services for their off-Amazon volume,” he said. “If they didn’t trust us, there are lots of other opportunities out there.”
Write to Liz Young at liz.young@wsj.com
