Emailed on June 21st, 2019 in The Friday Forward

Shopify is hands-down the biggest sleeping giant in tech, and this week they made some big waves.

At Shopify Unite (the company's developer conference) they announced the Shopify Fulfillment Network.

The Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) promises to give merchants custom packaging and branding, handle returns and exchanges, fulfill orders in one day and ship in two days and support customers of all sizes—whether they’re shipping 10 or 10,000 packages a day.

Unlike Amazon, which built its own fulfillment infrastructure through Fulfillment by Amazon, Shopify is working with third-parties – just as eBay is doing with its nascent fulfillment service called Fulfillment for eBay.

As Delian Asparouhov aptly said on Twitter: "Shopify could end up making more money on logistics than on its core e-commerce product. But switching a company that only really deals with bits to now deal with atoms is always a difficult transition"