Elizabeth Weise

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — After making moves into trucking and air freight, Amazon appears to be turning its thoughts to the sea.

The e-commerce company's Chinese affiliate, Amazon China, has registered with the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission to become a licensed ocean freight forwarder.

The filing was spotted Wednesday by Flexport, a San Francisco-based freight forwarder for consumer product makers.

The filing is just the first part of a longer regulatory journey required before Amazon China could actually ship packages. But it's a tantalizing piece of the puzzle as the Seattle company appears to be building out its own delivery service.

In the last two years Amazon has moved into leasing its own trailers and cargo jets, both in the United States and Europe. This appears to be the company's first move into ocean shipping, said Jarrett Streebin, CEO of EasyPost, a shipping and tracking platform for high volume e-commerce companies.

Amazon quietly builds its own shipping company

The license would allow Amazon China to provide ocean freight delivery to other companies and could mean that Amazon is moving into the $350 billion ocean freight market.

“This means they can provide ocean freight services for other companies. Looks like they are indeed moving quickly into the transportation business,” said John Haber, CEO of Spend Management Experts, a supply chain management consulting firm

The license is for non-asset owners, meaning Amazon doesn’t plan to actually purchase and own ships. Instead, it would allow the company to offer international shipping.

The filing is for Amazon China, formerly the Chinese e-commerce shopping site Joyo.com, which Amazon purchased in 2004. That could mean the company plans to ship goods from China outward.

That makes a lot of sense, said Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport, who first noticed the filing on Wednesday.

It would allow Chinese factories to sell directly to U.S. customers through Amazon.

“They won’t need the middle man,” he said.

The loser in all this will be Amazon resellers who buy from China and sell to customers in the United States. “They’re going to be disrupted,” Peterson said.

He doesn’t expect U.S. retailers to make use of Amazon’s shipping capacity, because they won’t want to give Amazon access to too much information about their production and sales.

The new service wouldn't be anything like Prime, with its two day delivery promise.

“You’d be buying directly from a factory in China. The goods could be put in an ocean container and it would take four to five weeks for them to arrive,” he said. The packages would likely be pre-sorted in China and then delivered to U.S. Postal Service for final delivery to customers.

The upside? “It will be almost free, it’s so cheap,” Peterson said.

Amazon declined to comment on the report.