A friend is testing a “shared supply chain infrastructure” model for SG ecommerce SMEs , feasible or operational disaster?
A friend recently shared a business model he’s working on and asked whether I’d be interested in joining as a partner.
I’m genuinely curious whether people here think it’s viable long-term or whether this kind of model eventually collapses from operational complexity.
The idea is basically this:
Instead of every SME independently managing sourcing, warehousing, fulfillment, inventory, financing & ecommerce operation, multiple independent operators would share centralized infrastructure.
My friend already have the sourcing, warehouse and fullfilment infrastructure in place. However, he want to hyperscale his business by on-boarding more partners in order to pooled purchasing power for supplier negotiations
So the argument is:
shared infrastructure could theoretically help smaller operators scale more efficiently.
Conceptually I can see the logic. But at the same time, I’m also wondering whether there are hidden downsides or operational risks that make this model difficult to sustain at scale.