Amazon spent the past 30 years building Amazon.com. It now serves over 300 million active customers with a wide selection of goods at competitive prices. You may be one of them.
But different customers have different needs.
Amazon has long known that businesses and organizations were shopping for office supplies and other goods in bulk on its store. To better serve them, the company launched Amazon Business in 2015.
“Everything we do at Amazon starts with the customer, and we kept asking ourselves, ‘How can we better serve those business customers?’” said Alexandre Gagnon, vice president of Worldwide Amazon Business. “The procurement space is ready for innovation. We have leveraged the size, expertise, technology, and infrastructure we have built at Amazon, and adapted it for businesses and organizations of all sizes.”
Amazon Business has since become one of the fastest-growing ventures in Amazon’s history. It reached $35 billion in annualized sales in 2023.
“I’ve been excited about Amazon Business since the day it launched,” said Doug Herrington, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Stores. “The Amazon Business team is committed to the long-term success of their business and its customers. Day in and day out, we dig into the specific purchasing needs of businesses and organizations and come up with innovative ways to deliver great prices, extensive selection, and consistent, reliable convenience. Businesses and organizations need different tools and features for their purchasing, and Amazon Business has built those tools. But we know that’s not enough, and we’ll keep iterating to make the customer experience even better.”
More than 6 million customers are now buying on Amazon Business. This includes small and medium-sized companies like the family-owned Red River Brewing Company in New Mexico, as well as large companies and institutions. Ninety-six Fortune 100 companies use Amazon Business, including Intel and Citi, as well as organizations like Johns Hopkins University, Seattle Children’s Hospital, and the United Service Organizations, and U.S. governmental entities, including the state of Utah and the U.S. Air Force.
“Amazon Business is constantly innovating on behalf of its customers—working on solutions and integrations that make procurement more efficient, and reducing overhead and manual processes,” Gagnon said. “Amazon Business supports integrations with Coupa and over 100 other procurement, payments, and ERP systems. We also support purchasing directly on Amazon.com for organizations that do not rely on an e-procurement system.”
Despite the progress and growth of Amazon Business, the energy inside makes it feel like a startup with a lot of room to expand further. Todd Heimes, the vice president and general manager at Amazon Business Worldwide, said there are millions of small businesses around the world, and they spend trillions every year on supplies and procurement.
“We are just getting started,” Heimes said.
Here are some frequently asked questions about Amazon Business:
Who can open an Amazon Business account?
Businesses and organizations of all sizes—local hair salons, schools, nonprofits, hospitals, global corporations, and government agencies—can open an Amazon Business account. The account is free, and there’s no spending minimum.
How does Amazon Business work?
Amazon Business gives organizations of all sizes the ability to buy from a large selection of hundreds of millions of items directly from the Amazon Business store, which has the same easy-to-use and intuitive interface as Amazon.com.
“One of the best things we have as a tailwind for Amazon Business is all of the work we’ve done for the last 25 years for consumers on Amazon,” Heimes said. “We’ve got a catalog with a wide selection, a world-class fulfillment capability, and a great customer experience that you’re used to. It’s easy to use with no training necessary. The search experience, the reviews, the shopping cart, and other popular features are all the same, and on top of that we’ve built business-specific features that allow companies of all sizes to integrate their procurement policies into the buying process.”
What does Amazon Business offer beyond vast selection, low prices, and convenience?
Amazon Business is designed to be flexible and can support customers of all shapes and sizes. It continuously develops scalable solutions by customer size and industry vertical. Amazon Business works with our customers to solve their biggest procurement challenges by giving them incredible technology such as Amazon Business analytics and Guided Buying, a program that helps businesses save time and gain control over employee spending, available with eligible Business Prime memberships.
“Amazon Business lets our customers use a set of policies or rules to ensure that certain types of products they buy meet those requirements,” Heimes said. “So, you could say, ‘I want to buy local,’ ‘I want to buy products with sustainability certifications,’ ‘I want to buy from veteran-owned or diverse suppliers.’”
Business owners and procurement staff are using Amazon Business for its end-to-end solution, which provides tools and analytics that give them control, visibility, and insight into purchasing, supply chain, and other activities.
“Smart business buying is really the culmination of machine learning and artificial intelligence we are bringing to bear on the procurement space,” Heimes said, “to help our customers buy and supply their needs in a smart way, to free them up to do what they really want to do, which is run their business.”
Does Amazon Business have a Prime membership program?
Yes. Business Prime is a popular membership similar to Amazon Prime but with business-specific benefits tailored to business buyers. It provides benefits like free shipping on eligible items, deals, and other features like Guided Buying and Spend Visibility, which helps track buying patterns to optimize savings. The Business Prime membership includes benefits and pricing plans, which vary across regions, tailored for various business sizes.
How do customers use Amazon Business?
Amazon Business helps large and small customers leverage what they’re doing today in the area of spend. But it can also help them source products with sustainability certification or goods sold by local, diverse, and other businesses.
Amazon Business customer MichaelElectronics2, an electronics reseller with warehouses in Oregon and Pennsylvania, credits Amazon Business with helping their operation “connect with customers nationwide and scale our operations significantly.”
“Amazon Business has been a game changer for MichaelElectronics2, helping us connect with a broader spectrum of business customers, from small startups to large enterprises,” said CFO Kerry Wang. “The tools and programs Amazon Business provides have transformed the way we operate and grow, offering us unparalleled opportunities for expansion and efficiency.” She specifically cited their business certifications as a powerful tool for connecting with customers. The company holds several key certifications, including Federal Section 889, Women-Owned Small Business, Small Business, and Minority Owned Business.
MichaelElectronics2 has seen explosive growth in its Amazon B2B business, achieving 542.8% year-over-year growth in sales and 19% year-over-year growth in certified sales. With a strong focus on innovation and customer service, the business continues to scale, offering high-quality tech solutions to businesses and individual customers alike.
“Amazon Business helps us to build trust with customers. That’s huge for B2B because businesses can put trust in Amazon, and Amazon puts trust in us,” Hanks Chen, the CEO of MichaelElectronics2, said. “The biggest benefit of Amazon Business is that we don’t need to be good at everything—we just need to be good at what we do best.”
These benefits also translate to tangible savings. “We make it really easy for them to procure at competitive prices and save money that can be then reinvested,” Gagnon said.
How do small businesses benefit from shopping on Amazon Business?
Amazon Business is a B2B store with hundreds of thousands of sellers competing to offer a wide selection of products at competitive prices with the convenient delivery experience you are used to from Amazon.
“It offers small businesses and organizations the opportunity to reduce costs and improve their efficiencies, so that they can focus on running their business,” said Heimes. “All of the conveniences we take for granted as consumers now are available to business customers.”
What attracts large customers to Amazon Business?
Heimes said that “digital procurement”—like shopping for supplies on Amazon Business—is a new concept for large organizations. He said that large businesses typically negotiate and buy from a limited set of suppliers. Amazon Business enables them to access hundreds of thousands of suppliers in one store.
“It's a really big opportunity for those large organizations,” he said. “It allows them to become much more efficient, reduce costs, and streamline their suppliers, which is a huge benefit to them.”
“Sometimes we forget all the great things that Amazon.com offers to consumers that generally don’t exist in the business world. Simple things, like knowing when items are going to get delivered. On that note, we can deliver millions of items next day,” Heimes said.
Amazon Business also helps business customers find competitive pricing for large orders.
“If you want buy 500 black chairs, we will take that quote, send it out to sellers we know sell chairs, and give them the opportunity to bid on that order,” Heimes said. “It’s called a request for a ‘quote,’ and it’s our offering to address our customers’ forecasted and large purchase needs.”
Who sells on Amazon Business?
Amazon Business offers hundreds of millions of products on its store. Most selling partners who sell on Amazon.com are automatically included in the Amazon Business store.
The Amazon Business teams also identify sellers with products that may be popular with business customers, then work to add their selection. “We’ve had personal paper shredders on Amazon.com forever, but we’ve now engaged sellers to secure industrial models to sell on Amazon Business,” said Heimes.
How do small and diverse businesses benefit from selling on Amazon Business?
Customers can use the Amazon Business store to not only spend their dollars frugally, but also in ways that support their communities.
When a local city government approached Amazon Business about keeping their procurement spend within their local community, Amazon Business worked with them to ensure that local businesses were identified as preferred suppliers so the spending for their organizations was staying within their community.
Amazon Business was able to do this because if companies qualify as a certified small, Black-, veteran- or women-owned business, it integrates those qualifications from the federal government, or other standard-defining organizations, and design tools so that any business owner or procurement officer at a large entity can direct their customers to support those specific businesses.
It can be challenging for large organizations to interact with small businesses given their processes and system requirements. But Amazon can help facilitate that.
The U.S. Air Force is a good example. Keen to buy more goods from small and local businesses, and keep and create jobs in their communities, Amazon Business enabled Air Force procurement staff to access a database of more than 100,000 small businesses and check whether any local small business within 50 miles of any Air Force base were selling the relevant supplies.
There were thousands of them. The Air Force has made 7,600 purchases from 2,600 local small businesses through Amazon Business. It said that $1.29 million went to small businesses, including women-owned, veteran-owned, and businesses in historically underutilized business zones.
Where is Amazon Business available?
Amazon Business started in the U.S. and since expanded to Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, India, and Mexico.
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