ABSTRACT
Since the end of the nineties, and as a consequence of the emerging web revolution, a process of reviewing the traditional models of organizing marketing channels has begun, with new emerging issues, in addition to those of disintermediation/reintermediation in the relationships between producers and trade intermediaries. What happened in the following years revealed a much more articulated picture, where multichannelling has come to dominate and where the boundaries between the various channel roles have quickly blurred. As a result, companies have been engaged in managing multichannel strategies by experimenting new organizational solutions in search for a new reference model. This issue involved both producers and retailers, with overlapping roles that contributed to making the framework more complex. In addition, also logistics started to change
dramatically, breaking the classic patterns where logistic actors played a functional role in bringing efficiency to a process where a large number of producers offered goods to a myriad of consumers. Nowadays, logistics solutions adopted by larger e-commerce marketplaces are making possible a return to a direct producer-consumer relationship that develops itself on a global perspective.
