Interesting that this "transformation" is pretty close to what Sun and other dot com infrastructure sellers were promising in 1998. They phrased it as "take your small town business and give it a world wide footprint" but it is the same. They missed the "we'll take 1/3 of your price too" part :-).

That, in itself, is just curious. But the interesting lesson here is that the real thing has not been "web presence" or world wide visibility, it was Amazon has built a pretty impressive logistics setup for moving stuff from vendors to users. It rivals what Sears & Roebuck did in the 60's and 70's. THAT seems to be the missing piece which one might call "logistics as a service."

It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US. Clearly there are a number of Amazon vendors who buy from factories advertising on AE and then drop ship to Amazon, and sell at a markup that covers Amazon's take and gives them a profit. So basically Amazon is taking a big piece of the "value chain" from factory to customer. If you can run a distributed logistics operation at 20% or even 15% of the market value of the goods your distributing, you can under cut Amazon.

Given that Walmart already has relationships with freight forwarders from China and a bunch of brick and mortar stores that could double as warehouses, I wonder if they have considered this as a "side hustle."

Considering that this hinges on the cost of operations for the logistics service the interest in logistic based robotics is quite understandable.