Ecommerce 4.0 is Retail's Next Frontier

Or, is the word 'retail' itself ready for a major transformation? As bricks and mortar retailers and 'traditional eCommerce' players are battling it for share online, there's a major transformation quietly happening that could make the words 'retail' or 'E-retail' increasingly out-of-date.  

There's a whole new concept happening; if a company has substantial web presence (i.e. we're all on it all the time), what's to stop them from selling to consumers with something as simple as a "Buy Now" button? Once, we connect our logistics infrastructure with APIs to all the trading partners, why wouldn't consumers buy products from Shopify, Google, Pinterest, Facebook or anywhere online? 

The most blatant example is the Shopify Fulfillment Network. Most people think of Shopify as a place that hosts online retailers and maybe that enables payments, but once Shopify has its own fulfillment network, isn't it a competitor to Amazon and all retailers? If a consumer can search for products, click to buy/pay, and there's fulfillment and delivery available; pretty sure that's what we call 'retail.'  

Our warehouse network (Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, Chicago, Toronto, Atlanta, and Scranton) is increasingly connecting to all-things online, and providing a backbone for retail's next frontier. I don't want to imply that bricks and mortar and 'traditional eCommerce' won't be huge for a long time, but there's clearly another category budding.