Drop-shipping and multi-channel fulfillment are definitely different things, although they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. Both are techniques to improve supply-chain management, and they're used by all sorts of retailers, from Walmart to mom-and-pop eBay merchants.

Drop-shipping is a form of "just-in-time" (JIT) inventory management: Instead of tying up cash in inventory and incurring the costs of storage, shipping, and waste/pilfering, the vendor may choose to purchase an item from his supplier when he has an order for it; the supplier then ships it directly to the vendor's customer. This makes a lot of sense for smaller retailers, who may want to offer their customers a broader range of merchandise than they are actually able to stock, and for vendors who don't maintain actual "bricks-and-mortar" stores, such as catalog and online merchants, since their business model doesn't require them to stock inventory for display and in-store sales. For these types of businesses, drop-shipping improves cash flow, reduces certain risks, and lowers costs -- all of which can lead to better profit margins for them and/or better prices for their customers.

Multi-channel fulfillment, on the other hand, is a technique for optimizing order fulfillment by vendors who have multiple sales channels (for example, retail stores and online sales, or multiple online storefronts). For example, if a customer makes an online purchase from a large chain retailer, he might be offered the choice of home delivery or in-store pickup for his order fulfillment. The multi-channel fulfillment offered by Amazon, which is what Holistic uses, enables the vendor to offer his products for sale at other online sites in addition to Amazon and route all of his orders to Amazon for fulfillment. Under this program, which is also called Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), the seller owns his inventory, stores it at Amazon's fulfillment centers, and pays Amazon a fee for their fulfillment services.