Amazon Didn't Kill the Middleman. It Became Him.

Part 2 of 3: Disintermediation and the fight for the front door

In part one we followed the middleman from the banks of the 1960s to the Sears catalogue, and the pattern held every time. The work never disappears. It changes address. Then the web arrived, and everybody forgot the pattern.

The Web Promised Everyone a Shopfront

Then came the 1990s and the greatest disintermediation fantasy in history. The web, we were told - and it is a message I repeated myself on the speaking circuit - would let every producer talk directly to every customer. Distance, shelf space and gatekeepers would be abolished.

So, how did that go?

Travel agents. In February 1995 Delta capped the commission it paid agents at $50 on a domestic round trip, down from a flat 10 per cent, and the other big US carriers followed within weeks. Expedia launched the following year. Agents did get hammered. And then Expedia, Booking and the metasearch sites turned up as the new agents, taking a cut of nearly every hotel room and airline seat, and hotels that wanted to escape them found their best-ranked listings were the ones paying the highest commission. The hotelier traded a travel agent for a faceless platform.

Newspapers. Classified advertising used to subsidise the whole business of reporting. Craigslist took it away for next to nothing. Nobody thinks Craigslist built a utopia of direct buyer-seller contact. Google and Facebook ended up with the advertising money, and they are intermediaries on a scale no newspaper proprietor ever dreamed of.

Music. Napster, around 1999, showed that the labels were not needed to move music from artist to listener. Then people realised they still needed somebody to find the music, pay the artist, and make the thing legal and easy. Apple's iTunes Store, and later the streaming services, filled that gap and now collect a toll on a catalogue they did not make.

Brokers. Online trading cut commissions to near zero. The broker's job of routing orders, holding assets and absorbing the risk of a bad trade went somewhere else, and the "free" trade is paid for by selling the order flow. The middleman is still there. You just stopped being the one paying him directly.

Bloggers and publishers. I have been writing a blog since 2007, so I speak with some authority here. We were told that anyone could publish without an editor or a printing press. True. And then discovery turned out to be the whole game, and a handful of platforms decided who saw what.

Notice the same four-step arc each time. The web lowers the cost of reaching customers. The flood makes discovery nearly impossible. A new aggregator organises the flood and earns trust. And the aggregator becomes more powerful than the old gatekeeper, because it controls something the old gatekeeper never did: the starting point.

Amazon, the Great Reintermediator

Amazon is the hinge of this whole story, so look at it carefully.

It did disintermediate. Physical shelf space stopped being a constraint, so the long tail of books, parts and obscurities suddenly had a home. Local retailers lost the monopoly that geography once gave them. Price comparison got easy. Delivery, reviews, search and payment were fused into one frictionless experience, which is the part that made it a killer.

But Amazon did not make commerce direct. It made itself the most consequential intermediary between buyer and seller that the world has ever seen.

Think about what a seller on Amazon actually faces. Marketplace ranking is the new shelf, and the seller has no say over where it goes. Sponsored placement is the new toll road, and the toll rises every year (Amazon's advertising business brought in about US$68.6 billion in 2025, and it grew out of the seller's desperation to be seen). Fulfilment became infrastructure, and a seller who wants the good badge has to hand over the logistics. Reviews became the trust layer, and Amazon owns the rules. Access to the customer is conditional on Amazon's terms, on Amazon's data, and on Amazon's mood.

A seller on the platform is not a free merchant selling to a free customer. She is a tenant in a shopping centre from hell, where the landlord can see her sales figures, copy her bestsellers, and raise the rent through advertising fees. Plenty of merchants will tell you, if you buy them a drink, that the shopkeeper's life was not worse than this.

That is the reintermediation, and it worked precisely because Amazon sat at the entrance. Which brings us to the real question. It was never "who completes the checkout?" It is "who receives the customer's intent first?"

The Front Door Keeps Moving

Consider the history as a series of changes in where the buyer starts, and who profits from that starting point.

Era	Where the customer starts	Who holds the power
Physical retail	The shop and the salesperson	Retailer and distributor
Early web	A search engine or a direct website	The search engine
Marketplace era	Amazon, eBay, a booking platform	The marketplace
Social-commerce era	A feed, a creator, a recommendation	The social platform
Agentic era	A personal agent acting on delegated intent	The agent provider and whoever holds the identity layer

 

Every row looks like the end of the one above it, and every row is a new gatekeeper selling access to the same customer. The merchant at the bottom of the stack, and that my friend is YOU the retailer, are the only constant. They keep paying for the privilege of being found.

The pattern is that control moves upstream, toward whoever sees the desire before anyone else does. A shopkeeper sees you when you walk in. A search engine sees you when you type. A feed sees you when you scroll. An agent sees you when you merely think "I need a kettle", before you have formed a query at all.

Next in the series: the last row of that table. Who is racing to own the personal agent, and whose side will it be on?