Amazon recently announced that Amazon Supply Chain Services is now open to all businesses, not just Amazon sellers. You can ship inventory from your manufacturers directly through Amazon's network to wherever it needs to go: Amazon fulfillment centers, your own warehouse, other retailers, or direct to consumers. On paper, it sounds like a significant unlock. In practice, it's worth thinking through carefully before you hand Amazon your entire logistics operation.
The announcement is real and the capabilities are genuine. The skepticism from logistics experts is equally real, and it's the more useful starting point for any brand trying to decide whether this is right for them.
What Amazon Is Actually Offering
Amazon Supply Chain Services combines several existing Amazon programs into a single integrated offering. You get Amazon's carrier network for inbound freight, Amazon Warehousing and Distribution for storage, and Amazon's last-mile delivery for outbound orders. Amazon handles the coordination across all of it, including inventory optimization and replenishment to FBA.
The pitch is compelling: one provider, one dashboard, Amazon's scale. For brands that currently manage a patchwork of carriers, 3PLs, and warehouse partners, the idea of consolidating into a single system has obvious appeal. Amazon is good at logistics. That's not a controversial statement.
What's more complicated is the question of what you give up when you make Amazon your single logistics provider, and whether the operational simplicity is worth that tradeoff.
Why Experts Are Skeptical
The concern that logistics professionals raise immediately is supply chain redundancy. When one provider handles your entire supply chain, a disruption anywhere in their network becomes your problem with no fallback. Amazon's network is enormous, but it's not immune to strikes, weather events, technology outages, or policy changes. The brands that navigated the pandemic supply chain chaos most successfully were the ones with multiple carrier relationships and flexible warehouse arrangements, not the ones most deeply embedded in any single provider.
The analogy that comes up is AWS. Amazon's cloud infrastructure is world-class, and thousands of companies run on it. It's also true that companies with sophisticated technology operations tend to maintain multi-cloud strategies, precisely because even excellent providers have outages. The same logic applies to physical logistics.
There's also the question of data. Amazon gets visibility into your inventory levels, your sales velocity, and your supplier relationships. Whether that bothers you depends on your category and your relationship with Amazon as a retail partner, but it's worth naming clearly.
The Real Calculation for Brand Sellers
For brands already selling primarily on Amazon, using Amazon Supply Chain Services for the FBA replenishment leg of their logistics is a relatively low-risk move. Amazon already has your inventory, and their inbound logistics for FBA have improved meaningfully. If you're currently managing a slow or expensive path from your manufacturer to an FBA fulfillment center, this program can help with that specific problem.
The more significant decision is whether to use Amazon Supply Chain Services for your non-Amazon fulfillment: your DTC shipments, your retail partners, your wholesale accounts. That's where the dependency question gets real. If Amazon is handling your Whole Foods replenishment and your website DTC shipments and your FBA inventory all at once, an Amazon logistics disruption affects every channel simultaneously.
The brands best positioned to benefit are those with simple supply chains, a single primary channel (Amazon), and limited non-Amazon fulfillment complexity. For brands with meaningful DTC operations, retail partnerships, or international distribution, the consolidation risk is harder to justify even at Amazon's scale.
What to Do With This
Don't dismiss the announcement outright. Amazon's logistics network is genuinely good, and there are real use cases where this program makes sense, particularly for smaller brands with messy inbound logistics to FBA. The program is worth evaluating if you're already using some of Amazon's supply chain tools.
Evaluate it as one part of your logistics mix, not as a replacement for it. The right question isn't "should I use Amazon Supply Chain Services?" It's "what specifically in my supply chain would this improve, and what redundancy do I need to maintain elsewhere?" Those are different questions, and the second one is the more important one.
If you want to think through how your supply chain setup affects your Amazon performance, we're happy to dig in. Schedule a call and let's look at your logistics setup in the context of your broader Amazon channel strategy.