Until now, only traders who ship their wares from Amazon’s central warehouses were able to participate in the Prime programme. Amazon Prime has now opened up to third parties, at least in the USA, according to the WSJ. This means that the number of products available on Amazon Prime will skyrocket. Nice for Amazon: it all comes out of the traders’ own budgets.

The promise remains the same for the 10 traders Amazon is supposed to have recruited for independent Prime shipping so far: orders have to get to the customer the following day, in line with the Prime promise. This means that the company’s own warehousing situation plays a role in their ability to participate in Prime.

The only question, is why Amazon is opening up its customer binding apparatus? They are obviously surprised by the success of the model and can’t keep up with the demand for a broadening of the Prime assortment. Apparently, there have often been complaints in the USA, that Amazon Prime cannot keep up with their own service promises because of such strong demand.

Perhaps these are just interim steps, until Amazon gets their own fleet on the roads?

Just a few weeks ago, the shopping centre around the corner from us ran an exhibition on counterfeiting. Recognise the fake Bosch chainsaw immediately? Impossible. and other knock-off products were virtually indistinguishable from the original. Where forgers used to write the name of the company wrong, e.g. “Adodas” instead of “Adidas”, today’s fakes look high quality at first… but they are still knock-offs.

Because it really comes down to trusting a shop in e-commerce, I was surprised that Amazon seems to have a lot of problems with counterfeits. The knock-offs aren’t just offered by other traders via the market place, but by Amazon itself, as they store them in their logistics centres. But whose fault is it? A look at one of Amazon’s biggest competitors gives us an idea.