When Will Haire, CEO and founder of BellaVix, an agency that works with Amazon sellers, toured Amazon’s Las Vegas warehouse facility in March this year, he was impressed by the operation that employed 6,000 workers. In addition to the workers, a packaging machine that was boxing and taping the items that travel on the conveyor belt caught Haire’s attention because it was super fast.

“It’s insane how efficient it is with the robotics, and how they preserve privacy and maintain anti-theft [measures],” he said. “This obviously came with years of making mistakes and learning, but they’re going to be the world’s largest logistics company.”

The technology piece of logistics is possibly what Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos had in mind when he decided to launch Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), which he described as—a set of web services that turned Amazon’s fulfillment center network into a giant computer device. “Pay us 45 cents per month per cubic foot of fulfillment center space, and you can stow your products in our network,” Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders in 2006. Amazon’s FBA is a characteristic story of the 21st century because of its technology.

When it launched in 2006, Amazon FBA didn’t create much controversy, but neither were people discussing it as a major development or game-changer. Amazon’s big step into the not-so-glamorous world of logistics started off quietly. Today, Amazon’s wild ride in the business of picking, packing, and shipping items, is a well-oiled machine that brands maintain is essential to grow on the platform.

Keep reading here.—VC

As the last century was winding down, the notion of buying and selling used items on the internet was just beginning to take hold, with the introduction of both eBay and Craigslist in 1995.

By today’s standards, however, recommerce was a byzantine process. To list an item, sellers had to take photos on digital cameras, then transfer the photos to their computers via SD cards or USB; to buy something, purchasers would have to both park themselves at a computer and be somewhere with Wi-Fi, perhaps at one of those Internet cafés that started popping up in the mid-’90s.

With a new century, however, came swift and dramatic improvements to mobile and e-commerce technology that would transform the resale market.

Keep reading here.—AAN

It was the summer of 2006. Harley Finkelstein was a law student at the University of Ottawa. He went to law school on the advice of a mentor who said he should treat law school like a finishing school for business and entrepreneurship. And he did. During one of his tax law classes, Finkelstein hit the launch button on his Shopify store.

About 20 years later, Finkelstein is now president at Shopify, but was one of the first merchants to start selling on this very platform. He recalls it was an “aha moment” that pretty much changed his life. “That was the magic of Shopify,” he said. “When you take someone with ambition and you mix it with this magical software, you end up with a life-changing opportunity,” Finkelstein said in an interview with Retail Brew.

Shopify launched in 2006 with its first ever store called Snowdevil. But it wasn’t until 2009 that the Canadian software giant found its groove. The launch of its app store essentially opened up Shopify’s ecosystem to third-party developers. Today, that same app store is a sheet of 16,000 apps. This marked the beginning of Shopify’s evolution from a basic tech company to a major e-commerce platform.

Keep reading here.—VC