Onboarding simplified: Tips for a smooth transition

Amazon Business empowers organizations to turn data into actionable insights, scale and operationalize responsible purchasing programs, and create an intuitive buying experience with purchasing guardrails. The Amazon Business Professional Services team is comprised of procurement experts who work directly with our customers to execute their unique purchasing program. Our team is involved from the very beginning of your journey with Amazon Business, meaning the transition between our team of experts is seamless.

Customers that qualify for Amazon Business Professional Services enjoy hands-on service by our team of technical experts to support complex or large-scale implementations. You may begin working with the Solution Consulting team, who will dive deep into your account needs and provide recommendations to optimize your Amazon Business account and seamlessly provide the Implementation team with the details needed to support your launch in a timely manner.

To support your transition to Amazon Business, regardless of where you’re starting, our Professional Services team shared their top tips new customers should consider to support their onboarding experience.

1. Plan and build your account structure

Add your users

Gather a list of users that you would like to have access to purchasing on your organization’s Amazon Business account. This includes collecting email addresses, first name, and last name of all users. The easiest method to add users to your account is adding 20 users at a time by entering their email address. If you have more than 20 users to add, consider using the bulk upload function to import users with a spreadsheet. Stay up to date by ensuring new employees get access to your Amazon Business account as part of your internal onboarding mechanisms.

• Watch a 4-minute video showing how to add and remove users.

Designate user roles and groups
Once your users have been added into your account, it’s time to assign their roles and permissions. Depending on your organization, this may include buyers, approvers, accounts payable, IT, and other administrators. Outline your current procurement processes and think about how you can segment your departments or teams into different buying policies, approval, or reporting needs.

Set up approval workflows

Empower employees across your organization to help reduce purchasing bottlenecks by setting up approval workflows. Encourage purchasing compliance at your organization without the need to review and approve/reject each individual order by setting clear limits and exceptions to policies. With approval workflows, you have the power to manage your organization’s spending and streamline your procurement process, while users on your account can easily view and take action on pending orders.

• Watch our 3-minute video and learn how to set up approval workflows

Support your buyers with easy-to-follow policies
Set buyers up for success by implementing Buying Policies. Advanced policies are available through Guided Buying if you are a Business Prime member. Eliminate the confusion around what buyers should and should not purchase to remain compliant with your organization’s policies by setting up policies that provide clear guardrails while shopping. Depending on your account, you can prefer local sellers to support your community or block products that you want to avoid your buyers adding to cart. The feature allows administrators to include buyer-facing messaging to appear, fostering transparency across your organization.

• Watch our 2-minute video and learn how to configure buying policies

2. Integrate existing systems

Single Sign-on (SSO)

Give your users secure, one-click access to Amazon Business with Single Sign-on, or SSO. Simplify the buyer onboarding and login experience to drive adoption and help achieve your goals. Administrators save time on manual processes such as inviting new buyers to the account with the implementation of SSO. Amazon Business integrates with most IdPs, and setup can be completed quickly by your IT team.

• Watch our 3-minute video on SSO for Amazon Business

E-procurement integrations
Amazon Business Integrates with 150+ e-procurement systems worldwide. Getting started is simple. If you are the account administrator, use our self-configuration tool.

• Watch a 2-minute video on integrations for Amazon Business

API
To automate your processes further, Amazon Business offers various APIs including Product Search - API (PS-API), Reporting/Amazon Business Analytics API (ABA-API), Reconciliation API (Recon-API), and User Management API (NTA-API).

• Read how one customer simplified receipt management by integrating SAP Concur through Reconciliation API. 

3. Familiarize yourself with reporting

With Business Analytics, buyers can access detailed spend data through reporting and customizable dashboards. Purchasers can access detailed spend data, track spending over time, identifying trends, and uncovering areas of potential savings. If your organization has a Business Prime membership, you’ll enjoy advanced dashboards through Spend Visibility.

4. Customize your delivery preferences

As a buyer, you can set up delivery preferences for individual addresses, including preferred days and time to receive, plus the option to add unique instructions to help direct deliveries to the right place. Take it a step further by adding guidance such as a loading dock or building access code so you can focus on your day-to-day, and not chasing down your delivery.