Set the right controls with Amazon Business’ buying tools

Amazon Business offers the vast selection and expedited shipping that Amazon offers along with unique buying tools that help businesses optimize their purchasing process. With smart business buying tools, account administrators can maintain oversight by creating budgets, steering buyers to preferred products, adding approval workflows, and collecting necessary order information for quick purchase reconciliation. 

Create budgets for your buyers to avoid overspending

Budget Management, our easy-to-use budgeting tool, allows you to set spend thresholds for your buyers and then track their spending. You can create a blanket purchase order for a group and allocate funds to buyers within that group. Buyers can then spend against the purchase order until they reach their allocation or the overall budget is depleted

You can also tailor budgets to business needs:

• Create recurring budgets: Set up regular budgets that automatically refresh to keep team spending aligned without manual intervention.
• Manage multiple budgets at once: Create and/or edit multiple budgets, allowing you to save time and seamlessly track spending.
• Set proactive budgets: Create proactive allocations to automatically assign funds to new team members as they join a group, saving time by eliminating manual tracking and assignment of funds.

Steer your buyers to the right products and suppliers

Create buying policies or rules, with Guided Buying, to set guardrails around how your buyers purchase on Amazon Business. You have the option to set policies that prefer or restrict items or sellers to alert your buyers of your organization’s shipping preferences. While restricted policies don't stop buyers from purchasing, they do warn them and you can add approval workflows to further support your policy., You can also block items which completely stops a buyer from purchasing specific items or from specific sellers. Guided Buying allows organizations to customize the buying experience to meet their procurement needs with policies like:

• Prefer products with sustainability certifications: Encourage buyers in your organization to purchase products with sustainability certification
• Restrict debarred sellers: Warn employees from buying items sold by debarred sellers
• Block adult products: Hide products that contain adult content and block them from being purchased

Guided Buying is available to all Amazon Business customers, with some policies available exclusively to Business Prime members.

Establish approval workflows to maintain oversight

Reinforce the rules that you’ve set for your buyers by directing your orders through an approvals process. Use Approvals to create workflows around your buying policies and to designate one or more approvers to review purchases. Approvers are notified of these purchases through email or push notifications, and then can quickly review and approve. Approvers can edit orders and also delegate another user to approve on their behalf if they are unavailable or out of the office. Additionally, you can create spending limits that require approvals for orders above a set dollar amount. 

Once submitted for approval, carts will hold the price and quantity availability of its items for 7 days, including weekends. Requests must be reviewed by the approvers, and ultimately approved, within 7 days or the request will cancel. Within the order details page, you can review a variety of items, including the shipping address, payment method, and each individual item requested. Once an order is approved, the buyer will receive a confirmation email and the order will route for fulfillment. If an order is not approved within the timeframe, the buyer can resubmit their cart. 

“With Amazon Business, teachers create a list on their classroom computer and submit. Workflows immediately take over, streamlining approvals. Teachers get exactly what they need, and they get it in two days.”

— Bradley Sponaugle, Assistant Treasurer, Berkeley County Schools

Simplify post-purchase reconciliation

Now that budgets are set, buying policies are created and approvals are in place, its imperative to prepare for post-purchase reconciliation. You can simplify this process by adding in fields to collect relevant order inforamtion from buyers during checkout. With Business Order Information, you can utilize our pre-set fields, like cost center or location, or create your own to collect necessary information for your business. Business Order Information helps administrators simplify financial processes like reconciliation, cost allocation, and spend analysis.