Instead of mirroring Amazon’s capital-intensive, fully-owned logistics network, MercadoLibre adopted a flexible hybrid model. It owns the core infrastructure but partners with local services for last-mile delivery, achieving speed and reliability without the massive capex burden.

Contrary to common belief for online-native brands, Peak Design's own retail stores have the highest contribution margin. This is because shipping products in bulk freight to stores is cheaper than covering the high last-mile delivery costs for individual e-commerce orders, which often qualify for free shipping.

You don't need massive scale to achieve group-purchasing power. By finding another company with a similar order and simply doubling the volume presented to a factory, a sourcing platform can negotiate price drops of 20-30%. This makes demand aggregation highly effective even at an early stage.

Before pursuing complex strategies, the most effective starting point for value creation in smaller businesses is a deep dive into cost accounting. This foundational work, often neglected due to its difficulty, reveals precisely where margins are made and destroyed, which then informs all subsequent strategic decisions.

Rockefeller identified transportation as his largest expense and made it his obsession. Instead of just minimizing this cost, he transformed it into a strategic weapon, negotiating secret rebates that not only lowered his costs but also generated profit from competitors' shipments, effectively funding his monopolistic expansion.

Instead of just asking for discounts, ask your major vendors about their internal goals, bonus structures, and objectives. By understanding their needs (e.g., product mix targets), you can help them achieve their goals in exchange for better pricing, rebates, and terms, creating a true win-win.

Shipt identified markups, fees, and tips as a key driver of churn. Since tips and some fees were unavoidable, they strategically focused on eliminating markups—the one component of the cost structure they could directly control—to create a powerful competitive advantage.

Flexport's AI optimization models achieved a rare win-win: making ocean shipping both 20% faster and 2% cheaper. This defies the conventional logistics trade-off where speed costs more. The AI constantly re-optimizes container placements, a task humans cannot do at scale, particularly for cancelled shipments.

Leveraging its positive cash flow from pre-sold tickets, Alinea offered to prepay its beef supplier for a four-month bulk order. Because this eliminated the supplier's spoilage risk, he dropped the price by nearly 50%. Businesses with float can use prepayments as a powerful negotiating tool to drastically cut COGS.