[dredmorbius]

Pretty much exactly this.

It's where the developing war between Amazon and Google starts to get interesting. Google's approach has been to work with existing brick-and-mortar stores via Google Shopping Express, which I suspect means tying into their ordering and inventory systems. That's also more-or-less an attack on IBM (which does a lot of SMB work as well).

Google gets storefronts, merchandise, direct retail, and business knowledge, while Amazon's got to build that, but has a single unified shopping and logistics system.

I'm not sure which is going to win, though I'm betting somewhat on Google.