Amazon has been going crazy lately with their web services offerings.
In case you haven’t heard, Amazon offers a web service called ECS to provide e-commerce functionality to outside applications in a service oriented fashion.
This has been around for a while, and I knew you could use it to interact with their store, but what I didn’t know before today (and this might be a new feature) was that you can also use the service to buy and sell your own products (not just those in the Amazon catalog), so you can use it to very quickly and easily provide e-commerce functionality to any web site you need to.
I came across this in researching their popular S3 storage service, which has (for quite a while now) been the prime example of the type of useful features that web services can offer in a service oriented way, so that you don’t have to write any code to handle it or manage the physical infrastructure behind it yourself - you just interact with their service API and you have storage, plain and simple.
In summary, ECS is to e-commerce as S3 is to storage. It’s pretty cool to finally see delivery on the promises / hype that web services were introduced with, and so far it seems that Amazon is taking the lead in doing it well.
[ UPDATE: After re-reading that, I realized that it really sounds like an ad, so I just wanted to clarify that it wasn't - I didn't receive any encouragement or compensation from Amazon or anyone else to make that post. It just struck me as really cool. ]