Flipkart, Amazon Flex Logistics Muscles; Will It Bring New Growth Levers?

When Delhivery acquired Ecom Express in 2025, the Indian logistics industry read it as a consolidation play — a larger player absorbing a struggling rival to build scale. What few anticipated was the vacuum it would create.

Ecom Express had been servicing some of the most remote pin codes in the country, carrying last-mile deliveries for D2C brands and vertical marketplaces in markets that the larger organised players had never prioritised. 

After the acquisition, operations in many of these non-demand centres were either scaled back or the combined Delhivery-Ecom Express entity’s pricing moved sharply upward.

Into that gap stepped two companies nobody had considered third-party logistics providers: Amazon and Flipkart.

“Essentially Ecom Express was servicing some of the remotest centres and pin codes of the country and its market included D2C brands and vertical marketplaces. After the acquisition by Delhivery, the operations were either scaled down in non-demand centres or the consolidated entity’s pricing went so high that Amazon and Flipkart were seen as viable alternatives — they were already present in these markets,” said Raju Sinha, chief business officer at logistics aggregator FShip.

Outside the festive season windows and marketplace-specific sales, the logistics capabilities of both Amazon and Ekart warehousing capacity, truck fleets, delivery workforce far exceeded the demand generated internally. Assets that cost billions to build were sitting underutilised for large parts of the year.

“This is the primary moat which has driven both Amazon and Flipkart to partner with even competitor marketplaces, apart from D2C brands and retail brands in areas still unserviceable by Blue Dart or where Delhivery charges 18–20% higher prices,” an industry source told Inc42.

The result is a strategic shift that is shaking up the competitive dynamics of a $300 Bn-plus logistics market. Amazon and Flipkart’s Ekart built to serve their own marketplace sellers are now openly competing with Delhivery, Blue Dart, Shadowfax, and DTDC for third-party logistics contracts. 

Who would have imagined that Nykaa, a direct Flipkart competitor in beauty and personal care, would rely on Ekart to deliver its orders? Or that Amazon would open its freight and fulfilment infrastructure to healthcare manufacturers and automotive companies that have never listed a single product on its platform?

The dynamics of India’s ecommerce industry are being rewritten and the new chapter looks nothing like the previous ones.

From Nykaa To IKEA: Amazon And Ekart’s Edge

For most of the last decade, logistics was a cost centre, a necessary but expensive function that Amazon and Flipkart built to outdo each other on delivery speed. 

The infrastructure that emerged from that war is basically now the asset being monetised.

According to the industry observers, both companies initially experimented with servicing D2C brands through aggregator platforms. 

Over the last two to three years, that has evolved into opening their logistics networks directly to third-party brands, vertical marketplaces, and enterprise clients with value-added services going well beyond last-mile delivery.

Amazon’s clearest move came in May 2026 with the launch of Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS), which extends the company’s entire logistics portfolio including freight, warehousing, fulfilment, and last-mile delivery  to any business, regardless of whether it sells on Amazon’s marketplace. 

Healthcare companies, automotive manufacturers, retail chains, and consumer goods firms can now move raw materials and finished products through the same network that powers Amazon.com. Procter & Gamble, 3M, and Lands’ End were among the first wave of ASCS clients globally according to Amazon’s official announcement.

In India, the groundwork had been laid well before the ASCS announcement. 

Amazon launched Amazon Freight in December 2024 as a full-truckload transport service for intra-city and inter-city movement.

Amazon Shipping, its last-mile offering, was expanded to cover over 14,000 pin codes, with real-time tracking and cash-on-delivery disbursements within 48 hours. 

Both services are available to businesses independent of their association with the Amazon marketplace.

The Multi-Channel Fulfilment (MCF) service has seen the strongest traction, with over 1,000 D2C brands  including Himalayan Organics, DermaTouch, and Satthwa using Amazon’s fulfilment network to service orders placed on their own websites, Shopify stores, and social media channels.

 “What originally started as last-mile delivery solutions for D2C brands is now transforming into warehousing services, checkout solutions, IoT-powered intelligence, packaging as a service and even quick deliveries for businesses,” said Sinha of FShip.

Ekart, meanwhile, is further ahead in this journey and arguably operating at greater sector depth.

According to industry sources, Ekart today serves a broad range of external clients including Snapdeal, Nykaa, TataCliq, IKEA, fashion brands, electronics companies, and automotive businesses. Its services are bespoke, varying significantly by client requirement.

The IKEA partnership launched in Delhi-NCR in March 2025 and expanded to Chennai in April 2026  is the most visible example of how far Ekart has come from its origins as a marketplace delivery arm. 

Ekart now manages end-to-end last-mile delivery for IKEA’s catalogue of over 600 products, including large-format furniture and home solutions requiring specialised handling.

“Our expanded partnership with IKEA reflects Ekart’s strength in building and operating enterprise-grade, specialised supply chain solutions for leading global retail brands,” Mani Bhushan, chief business officer at Ekart, said. 

“As large-format retail continues to scale in India, the need for reliable, technology-led logistics partners is becoming increasingly critical.”

For Ather Energy in Bengaluru, the mandate is structurally different.

 According to industry sources familiar with Ekart’s operations, the logistics firm handles the movement of automotive components and parts between manufacturing locations, warehouses, and distribution points, a supply chain role that demands precision scheduling and handling protocols different from regular  parcel delivery.

The objective, in both cases, is not simply courier services.

 Ekart is now  increasingly positioning itself as an end-to-end logistics partner capable of managing transportation, warehousing, fulfilment, inventory visibility, and last-mile operations under a single contract. 

The company has also entered document logistics, offering supply chain solutions for banks and non-banking financial companies. A quarter of its external client brands already use multiple services in combination according to the company sources.

An emerging dimension of this push is the franchise model. 

According to industry executives, both Amazon and Ekart are experimenting with franchise and partner-operated logistics centres — allowing local entrepreneurs to run fulfillment and delivery facilities while leveraging the larger company’s technology and network. 

For Amazon and Flipkart, this provides a path to deeper penetration in Tier 2, Tier 3, and rural markets without bearing the full capital burden of building every node themselves.

“The franchise model is likely to gain more traction in the near future under an aggregator structure. Amazon and Flipkart have leverage in terms of access to local pin codes and seller networks, which gives them an edge over vertical firms,” a former Ekart senior operations executive told Inc42. 

DTDC, notably, already runs approximately 50% of its logistics business through a franchise model, a playbook that the ecommerce majors appear to be studying closely.

The Moat That Took Two Decades To Build

The competitive advantage Amazon and Ekart bring to B2B logistics is not any single asset.

 It is the compound effect of decades of capital deployment, operational refinement, and technology investment now being offered to the market as a service for the first time.

But the real moat is what happens when clients use multiple services.

For instance, a brand that begins with Ekart for last-mile delivery and then adds warehousing, freight,  returns management, progressively embeds itself into the infrastructure. 

The switching cost rises with each additional service. 

This is the same “platform lock-in” logic that turned Amazon Web Services from an internal infrastructure project into the world’s most profitable cloud business  and it is what both Amazon and Ekart are deliberately engineering in logistics.

Dough Herrington, chief executive officer of Worldwide Amazon Stores,while announcing Amazon’s logistics initiatives earlier said that the move is similar to how Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened the company’s cloud infrastructure business. 

“This is an exciting step in bringing the logistics network we built for our customers to all businesses, much like we did for cloud infrastructure when we launched Amazon Web Services,” he said.

The technology layer reinforces this stickiness further. 

Businesses using Amazon’s MCF and ASCS can leverage AI forecasting models and Amazon’s vast supply chain data set to optimise inventory placement across sales channels. 

For Ekart, the same real-time tracking, route optimisation, and supply-chain visibility infrastructure that powers Flipkart’s marketplace operations is available to external clients — reducing the fragmentation that retail brands have long struggled with when managing multiple logistics vendors.

The impact on the competition will be keenly watched out for.

Delhivery’s shares fell 4% in India the day after Amazon’s ASCS announcement, with markets pricing in the structural implications of a competitor with Amazon’s scale entering B2B logistics more aggressively. 

Delhivery’s own position is formidable with  over 18,850 pin codes, 20 Mn  square feet of logistics infrastructure, 40,000 customers across automotive, chemicals, electronics, and pharma.

Its  acquisition of Ecom Express was designed to build exactly the kind of scale needed to withstand this pressure.

 Shadowfax dominates same-day hyperlocal deliveries. Blue Dart owns premium air express. XpressBees has built strong B2C parcel volumes.

Each has a defensible niche. But the mid-market  where integrated B2B supply chain contracts are won on price, reliability, and technology breadth will be the real market set for competition.

The Challenges That Infrastructure Alone Cannot Solve

None of this transition is without friction. The entry of Amazon and Ekart into external B2B logistics creates structural challenges that will not resolve themselves simply because both companies have built formidable networks.

The most consequential is the data exposure problem.

Amazon is simultaneously a marketplace operator, a private-label seller, an advertising platform, and now a full-stack logistics provider. 

A D2C brand or a vertical marketplace that hands Amazon its inventory data, regional demand patterns, supplier information, and fulfillment economics is giving a competitor a granular map of its supply chain. 

Amazon’s earlier expansion into private-label categories like  apparel, accessories, daily essentials  was enabled in part by the data visibility the marketplace afforded. 

Extending logistics services to third parties deepens that visibility further, giving Amazon a potential advantage that goes well beyond the logistics contract itself.

There is also a capacity priority question. 

During peak demand periods festive season, platform sales Amazon and Ekart will inevitably prioritise their own marketplace operations. 

How that affects enterprise clients who are paying for supply chain reliability is a concern that industry sources flag repeatedly, and one neither company has addressed publicly with any clarity.

Both companies also face the operational challenge of sectors they have not historically served. 

For instance, automotive supply chains, pharmaceutical cold chains, and heavy engineering freight carry compliance requirements, damage tolerance standards, scheduling precision demands, and specialised handling protocols that are structurally different from ecommerce fulfillment. 

Pricing discipline is another risk the industry is watching closely. 

Amazon’s infrastructure scale gives it the ability to offer steep discounts and bundled contracts that pull clients away from incumbents. 

But sustained below-market pricing compresses margins across a logistics industry already absorbing fuel cost shocks from escalating geopolitical pressures. 

Finally, there is the regulatory dimension. 

India’s logistics sector operates across a complex web of state-level regulations, GST compliance requirements, and motor vehicle laws. For segments like pharmaceutical warehousing and chemical freight, additional sector-specific regulations apply. Amazon and Ekart are better positioned than most to navigate this but as their B2B footprint extends into regulated industries, the compliance burden will grow proportionately.

The real test for both companies is not whether they can offer cheaper logistics.. The test is whether they can offer external clients the same reliability, data security, and operational parity that those clients would demand from a partner with no competing commercial interests. 

For Delhivery, Shadowfax, Blue Dart, and the rest of India’s logistics ecosystem, the message is stark: the two companies that gave them business at the outset are now their most formidable competitors.

[Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam]

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