I actually run an FBA business. For me to ship 500x units to the warehouse, from my home in Australia, it costs around US$200. Factor in the FBA fee of around

I actually run an FBA business. For me to ship 500x units to the warehouse, from my home in Australia, it costs around US$200. Factor in the FBA fee of around $3 per unit, and you get a total shipping and logistics cost per batch of $1700. For me to ship 1x unit from my home in Australia to the US, it would cost around US$20 and take 2 weeks to get there. In this instance, I've paid $10,000 and the customer experience is worse. Even if I were based in the US, I'd be looking at $6 per package via USPS, plus all the fucking around to label and box up those 500x units. (That's maybe $3200 total including packaging, plus about 10 hours' labour distributed over the course of two months.) I guess the point is that making use of highly-efficient logistics services allows both small businesses and courier companies to access Amazon's economies of scale.