This is Tech

Amazon is adding fulfillment to its impressive list of web services. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, SimpleDB and Simple Storage Service are the back-end behind a large number of young lean Internet startups. Amazon announced its new Amazon Fulfillment Service (Amazon FWS) yesterday. While Amazon’s original web service are targeted toward those building web applications, the fulfillment web service, and Amazon’s fulfillment program, have broad application to retail businesses generally. Outsourcing warehousing, shipping and handling take one more burden off of small businesses allowing them to focus on more important things.

What is exciting about Amazon’s web services is that they are affordable for small companies with limited budgets, but scale seamlessly to enterprise levels. And as Matt Hulett mentioned in his Startup Whisperer blog last week, Scale is Sexy. Amazon’s fulfillment system is also nimble, meaning that if your product gets a surge of good press, Amazon can will ship the burst of orders without blinking, and then go back to your standard order flow once things settle down.

The new web services interface means that you can programmatically trigger shipments, and run a completely automated fulfillment process built into your retail software or web site shopping cart.

Pricing for Amazon fulfillment service is below. The use of web service is free.