A Seattle startup has come out of nowhere to offer online merchants something even Amazon doesn't: overnight ground delivery to nearly anyone in the country.

Location is everything in the real-estate biz, so it's not entirely surprising that a map changed former developer Donald Trump's mind.

A recent acquisition spree including Jet.com has given the retail giant much-needed digital chops.

Chieh Huang has borrowed a lot from Amazon.com Inc. to expand his e-commerce startup Boxed Wholesale, which sells bulk packages of paper towels, granola bars and maxi pads, including free delivery within two days on most orders and an inexpensive house brand of products. And, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Huang started the company in his garage in 2013.

In 2012, Matt Scanlan, the founder and chief executive officer of Naadam Cashmere, was just a young New York University alumnus with an unsatisfying job at a venture capital firm. "After a couple years of working as an analyst - which is a pretty thankless job - I left," he says. "A week after I quit, I booked a flight" to Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, to visit a college friend who lived in the region. The two of them met a newspaper reporter who hailed from Scanlan's hometown of Westport, Conn., and soon happened to hit it off with a couple of the reporter's sources, nomadic goat herders."

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., long known for squeezing its suppliers on prices, is now pressuring companies including Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive Co. to help the world's biggest retailer remove a billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain by 2030.

Imagination Technologies Group Plc discovered how fickle life can be as an Apple Inc.supplier when it was ditched this month by the iPhone maker. More suppliers may suffer the same fate as the world's largest technology company faces a shrinking number of semiconductor makers and expands into areas that need special chips designed in-house.