Amazon is testing a service that uses its Flex drivers to deliver packages from mall-based retailers, expanding the variety of goods available for fast shipment
Amazon.com Inc. is testing a service that uses the company's sprawling network of gig drivers to fetch packages from mall-based retailers and deliver them to customers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Flex began in 2015 as a consumer-facing on-demand delivery play — an explicit rival to Postmates — and has since been repurposed twice: the Seller Flex trial put Amazon's drivers on its own marketplace shipments, and the freight-matching service extended the network upstream to trucking. The new mall-retailer test is the third act: the same gig fleet now fetches inventory from third-party stores, not just Amazon warehouses.
That matters because it turns Flex from a cost center serving Amazon's own catalog into a sellable fulfillment layer for retailers who never listed on Amazon. The 2017 reporting on Flex workers described a driver pool coordinated entirely through the app — infrastructure that can be re-pointed at any pickup origin without new assets.
First-order effects
- Mall-based retailers gain access to Amazon's fast-shipment promise for their own goods without building any last-mile capability of their own, while Flex drivers get a new pickup-and-deliver task type routed through the existing app.
Second-order effects
- Crowdsourced delivery rivals — the category Flex entered in 2015 explicitly to challenge Postmates — now compete against a network whose fixed driver base is subsidized by Amazon's own package volume, pressuring their per-delivery economics.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from Seller Flex through freight matching to mall pickups holds, Amazon's logistics stack keeps getting externalized service-by-service, pulling third-party retail fulfillment onto infrastructure Amazon owns and prices — a structural shift toward retailers renting delivery rather than operating it.
The trend: Amazon is systematically converting internally built logistics capabilities — gig delivery, freight matching, warehouse fulfillment — into third-party services that make competitors dependent on its network.