If you've ever thought about starting your own business, one of the big barriers for many people is the fulfillment of orders - the part where you actually send the customer the thing that they have bought from you. There's a lot of overhead in setting up order fulfillment and it's a labor-intensive process. For many people, this stops them cold in their tracks.

Well, there is now a much easier solution to this fulfillment problem, and it comes from a company that knows a lot about order fulfillment: Amazon.com. They are now offering an order fulfillment service to business. This is great news for small businesses.

Briefly how it works is that you send your product to Amazon; they have 20 fulfillment centers and you can send as much of your product to as many centers as you like. They store your product. You then send order information to them and they take care of picking out the items they have ordered, packing them up, and shipping them. They then take a percentage of the sale.

Given Amazon's large economy of scale, they can do this far cheaper than just about anyone else. If you've thought about starting your own business but where put-off by the logistical nightmares of order fulfillment, it may be time to reconsider your plans.