Amazon rebrands third-party logistics arms as unified supply chain service

May 4, 2026

Amazon on Monday invited third-party businesses to access the full suite of logistics services it uses internally to support e-commerce orders on its platform, officially packaging the discrete shipping and delivery services it has been offering for years under the umbrella brand of Amazon Supply Chain Services.

The announcement essentially declared that third-party logistics services is now a main business line, along with retail, cloud computing services and grocery.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) said it is extending its portfolio of freight, distribution, fulfillment and parcel shipping services to all businesses, effectively making available the excess capacity in its network to outsiders. Companies across industries from automotive, to healthcare and retail will be able to ship anything from raw materials to finished goods.

Analysts said Amazon would need to invest in much more infrastructure to directly compete across the board with large ocean freight wholesalers, freight forwarders and trucking companies, but that integrated logistics providers like FedEx and UPS could be under threat.

Amazon this decade has been evolving into an integrated freight and logistics provider, externalizing various parts of its logistics operation and offering wholesale capacity to shippers.

Fulfillment by Amazon allows small merchants selling on Amazon’s platform to use Amazon for inventory management, fulfillment and last-mile delivery. In early 2023, Amazon opened eligibility for Buy with Prime to all e-commerce merchants, instead of by invite only. The program allows online sellers, including those that do not sell on the company’s website, to offer Prime fulfillment services through their own online stores. Also in 2023, Amazon rolled out a stand-alone shipping service under which the retail-tech giant uses its independent drivers to provide pickups at warehouses and handle the shipments to final delivery

In 2024, Amazon launched Amazon Air Cargo, allowing shippers to buy space on its private cargo airline. Supply Chain by Amazon, for example, leverages the company’s position as a bulk buyer of ocean freight capacity. As an ocean consolidator for cargo from Asia to the United States, Amazon is responsible for picking up inventory from manufacturing facilities worldwide, booking the shipment with an ocean carrier, handling customs clearance and ground transportation, managing inventory replenishment, and delivering to its warehouse.

Amazon on Monday said the debut of Amazon Supply Chain Services builds on the momentum from transporting, storing and delivering hundreds of millions of packages for outside shippers over the past three years.

“Amazon is bringing the infrastructure, intelligence, and scale of its supply chain services — proven over decades — to businesses everywhere, much like Amazon Web Services did for cloud computing,” said Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services. “Supply chain wasn’t just a function at Amazon — it was core to providing an exceptional shopping experience. Our differentiator. The reason we could offer fast, dependable delivery that nobody else could. And with the launch of ASCS, we’re confident we can give any other business access to the same cost efficiency, reliability, and speed that we’ve built for Amazon customers.”

Early users of Amazon’s end-to-end-logistics operation include Procter & Gamble, 3M, Land’s End and American Eagle Outfitters.

“Amazon is one of our key e-commerce partners, and we’re excited to leverage Amazon Supply Chain Services to position inventory closer to customers so we can reach them even faster,” said Andrew McLean, CEO of Lands’ End, in a news release. “This consistency is central to our solutions-based approach, enabling us to serve customers with confidence and agility, especially during peak seasons.”

Procter & Gamble is using Amazon’s freight services to transport raw materials to production facilities and move finished goods across its distribution network, Amazon said. 3M is leveraging Amazon’s freight services to move products from its manufacturing sites to distribution centers worldwide; Lands’ End is using a unified inventory pool within Amazon’s network to fulfill orders across multiple sales channels; and American Eagle Outfitters is using Amazon’s parcel shipping network to deliver online orders from its American Eagle and Aerie website directly to customers nationwide.

Amazon’s freight network is supported by a fleet of more than 80,000 trailers, 24,000 intermodal containers and 100 freighter aircraft. Amazon said customers also benefit from Amazon’s AI forecasting models and vast supply chain data set, which help optimize inventory placement.

Starting Monday, businesses can access a centralized console to search, select, and sign up for the various ASCS services, according to the news release.

“Amazon has been offering logistics services for at least three years. This just draws new attention to those capabilities, which have been tested and proven to work with case studies” of large shippers, said Satish Jindel, a respected supply chain analyst and president of ShipMatrix.

Freight brokers and forwarders should take Amazon’s announcement seriously if they support small retail customers, he warned. Those operators will have to demonstrate how they can provide better personalized shipping support than a tech behemoth, which will be targeting their customers.

Meanwhile, FedEx and UPS, which have pivoted to focus on B2B and premium B2C packages, “need to realize that Amazon is not just a B2C parcel guy because 18% of deliveries from Amazon online orders are delivered to businesses. A lot of small businesses are buying things online from Amazon now,” Jindel said.

Wall Street is punishing freight transportation stocks in midday trading, with UPS down 9.5%, on concerns that Amazon news represents a major threat to their business, but various industry observers suggest any impact is marginal because Amazon already competes in the logistics space.

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Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.