Heather Crawford's Blog

With the online market place booming, many businesses are turning to online stores where companies can deal with each individual customer directly.  This process avoids the traditional distribution channels, which calls for an intermediate, and therefore cuts out the middleman.  Shipping through parcel companies can eat into many businesses costs and therefore many companies start their own shipping company for their products.  In order for businesses to benefit from this cost-argument, companies need to have great expertise in infrastructure and be able to recoup the costs of such an endeavor.   Companies such as Dell and Levis Strauss have successfully achieved this disintermediation process; as well P&G, a manufacture that sells a wide range of consumer goods, hopes to expand into this form of market.  Not only do the companies themselves receive cost-benefits, so do customers as the costs per item are decreased and therefore the price in the store is reduced as well.  What happens though if too many middlemen are cut? How would the world of business change if all companies became their own distributers?