E-commerce Marketplaces and Cross-Border Direct-to-Consumer

E-commerce moved the last step of retail's supply chain — the trip from the shelf to the home — onto the seller, and turned it into a parcel. Whoever does that cheaply and reliably at scale earns a moat; whoever subsidises it without density loses money on every order. Amazon is the reference case: after carriers failed to deliver its Christmas 2013 parcels on time, it built its own sortation, air, van and delivery-partner network, and it sells that network to third-party sellers through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA, 2006), whose fees it keeps changing (a restructuring of inbound placement fees from 15 Jan 2026 and a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on FBA fulfilment fees from 17 Apr 2026, per seller-service trackers; verify against Amazon's rate cards). Shopify tried to build a fulfilment network for its merchants, bought Deliverr (2022, ~$2.1bn), and sold its logistics business to Flexport in 2023 for an equity stake — the clearest case of a platform deciding it should not own the supply chain. A different model grew from China: Shein's on-demand production in very small batches, and Temu's "fully managed" marketplace (launched Sep 2022), both shipping individual parcels by air to US consumers duty-free under the $800 de minimis exemption — until it ended for China and Hong Kong on 2 May 2025 and was suspended for all countries on 29 Aug 2025, a suspension kept after the Supreme Court's 20 Feb 2026 IEEPA ruling, written into CBP interim final rules on 24 Jun 2026 and upheld by the CIT on 13 Aug 2026 (Shared facts). Temu stopped China-direct shipments to US buyers and shifted to locally stocked sellers (reported, May 2025); Shein listed in Hong Kong on 1 Sep 2026, raising ~US$1.7bn at HK$48.56 a share and falling as much as ~10% on its debut at a valuation reported at ~$25bn, against a ~$100bn peak in 2022 (reported). Outside the US and China, Coupang (South Korea) and Mercado Libre (Latin America) show marketplaces that won by building the network first. This section explains marketplace economics (GMV vs revenue), Amazon's fulfilment model and fees, the platform's choice between owning and orchestrating logistics, cross-border direct-to-consumer and the de minimis channel, Chinese logistics champions, Europe's rules, and returns.