Amazon.com, the website, is a database which churns out orders that manifest in the real world. But once that happens is not amazon.com the actual site any more. That has done its job of gathering data, processing it, and outputting it.

Its like if I phoned in an order. The web site is like the phone system. The phone system is not doing anything in the physical world, except passing on the data of an order.

That said, I can see a right old debate about there the lines of separation are.

However they only did it because they had to reduce costs and simplify processing. I'm pretty sure Amazon would be much happier to just dropship by making an API call to third party logistics - which is essentially an inventory database from Amazon's point of view - but they are just too big now.

I think they still do that with long tail items (don't store, but use third party logistics with an API call).