In 2015, Prentis Wilson announced to the world Amazon’s newest venture, Amazon Business.
Available to businesses, small and large, Amazon Business offers exclusive features and discounts when shopping on Amazon. Third-party sellers of all sizes can also benefit from the service to sell to businesses worldwide.
A decade on, Amazon Business now accounts for $35 billion in revenue and serves 5 million businesses. Today, let’s dig into Amazon Business, why it’s so popular with SMEs and how sellers can benefit from this exciting and growing new service.
Amazon Business: Why do business buyers love it?
SMEs love Amazon Business and it’s not hard to see why. The service is packed with useful features to make purchases easier and reduce the admin involved in procurement. From one man bands to medium-sized enterprises, Amazon Business is working hard to expand its reach to more buyers than ever.
Let’s take a look at some of the key features which have helped win over those 5 million dedicated businesses.
Everyone loves a discount
Let’s not beat around the bush, everyone loves a discount, and business buyers have access to exclusive discounts unavailable to Amazon’s 300 million other buyers. This alone is a great draw, but that’s not all.
Amazon also knows that businesses buy in bulk, so they lean into this, turning it to their advantage. Amazon Business buyers can secure additional discounts on bulk purchases, the more businesses buy at once, the higher the discount on offer.
Tax invoice confidence
Some years ago I was responsible for office purchasing on Amazon. It was very important for our finance team that all purchases came with tax invoices so we could reclaim the tax back from the UK government. Sadly, this meant I had little choice but to buy from Amazon directly. Why? Because with third-party sellers it was a bit of a Russian Roulette if I would get that tax invoice or not. Even if the seller did offer one, this wasn’t automatic and required reaching out directly to the seller. So, the obvious decision was made to avoid third-party sellers.
If Amazon Business existed at the time, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Today Amazon Business flags which sellers offer invoices and better yet, users can download them directly from the Amazon order page, no contact needed. This means that business buyers can purchase with confidence, knowing they’ll always get that invoice when buying from a business seller.
Purchasing Policies
When I was involved in procurement, I wasn’t the only one responsible for making purchases. This meant that the company card, something that should be highly controlled was being passed about between staff, something that is pretty darn risky in hindsight.
Today, we could have avoided this with Amazon Business. Amazon Business allows admins to create a sub-account for each purchaser, sharing the company card details from the admin account so you never have to share them directly. Would have been handy for us!
Admins can also set their Business Policies to control what and from whom employees can purchase. Some common useful policies could be:
- Sellers must offer a tax invoice
- Only buy from local sellers
- Purchases must include a minimum of 10 units
To further help control the purchasing process, Amazon Business allows users to set their own internal purchase numbers or have approval for purchases before the order is placed. Best of all, they can set spending limits on sub-accounts to avoid any end-of-month surprises!
Business Prime
Most of us have Amazon Prime (67% of us to be exact!). As a Prime subscriber, you get far more than just free delivery. It comes with additional perks like movie streaming and free photo storage. These additional services aren’t as useful to businesses as individuals, so Amazon launched Business Prime. This comes with the same fast and free delivery, but also a suite of additional features more useful to businesses:
- Cashback on American Express purchases of 2%, or payment deferral of 90 days
- Consolidate orders into a single weekly delivery day
- Spending reports and insights
- Purchase policies
- Member-only offers
- Free access to Delighted survey tools
Amazon Business: What’s in it for sellers?
Selling business to business is in and of itself a good step for any developing business to take. B2B selling comes with its own set of advantages beyond what comes with Amazon Business itself, including but not limited to:
- Higher average order volume and value
- Higher customer retention
- Less saturated market
- Lower returns
But beyond this, what extra advantages do you, as a seller get when supplying business buyers through Amazon Business?
Be competitive—with everyone
Ensuring competitiveness is essential to making a success of your Amazon business (pun intended!). 5 million businesses already buy through business accounts and if you don’t use Amazon Business as a seller you won’t be able to compete with those sellers who do.
Amazon Business allows sellers to offer exclusive pricing to business buyers—pricing that is not visible to non-business buyers or sellers. So, if you’re not offering Amazon Business, your competitors are likely undercutting you, regardless of what repricing strategies you are using.
Bulk purchases mean reduced costs
I shouldn’t need to tell you that when someone buys in bulk, it means lower costs for you. It’s far easier to send 100 units in a single package vs 100 individual packages. Using Amazon Business and their Quantity Discounts you’re able to incentivise business buyers to purchase from you, but also purchase in bulk. It’s a win-win for everyone!
Say goodbye to manual invoices
As a business, the admin of generating and sending tax invoices is a serious overhead and time sink, especially when selling in Europe. Amazon Business comes with a suite of features to automatically generate and distribute tax Invoices to business buyers. This way, your customer service team can focus more on the important cases, and less on admin.
Seller Recommendations
Identifying what product will be your next best seller can be challenging but help is available. Amazon Business offers Seller Recommendation reports tailored to your product category. These recommendations highlight products similar to those you already offer but are particularly popular with business buyers.
You can use these recommendations to expand your product catalog in confidence, knowing that you’re stocking products that are popular in your product categories.
Amazon Business—Is it ready for Prime Time?
So, is now the time to jump into Amazon Business? There is no argument that Amazon Business is an opportunity which is hard to pass up. As a fast-growing market, doing anything else would risk leaving money on the table, something that no business can afford to do in a competitive market.
If you want to start offering your products to business buyers through Amazon Business you can start today. Once you’re set up, Repricer.com is ready to support your repricing needs. With a fully featured Amazon Business Repricing tool you can ensure that you’re the most competitive seller on the market. Sign up today and get a 14-day free trial.
