Unlocking a new customer base for sellers

Sellers on Amazon have different stories, come from diverse backgrounds, reside in countries all over the globe, and for all of them Amazon Business created an opportunity to grow with an incremental customer base: companies who purchase for their business purposes.

Business-to-business (B2B) customers desire the same convenience of shopping on Amazon.com, but they have unique needs. These customers want business-relevant selection in bulk at lower prices, delivered during business hours. Since its inception in 2015, Amazon Business has enabled third-party sellers with tools and programs specifically designed to meet the expectations of B2B customers. This means big discovery for sellers of every size – as soon as you list your first product on Amazon as a Professional Seller, you have instant access to B2B customers.

Why Amazon Business?

B2B customers, on average, place higher volume orders (+109% more units per order vs consumer order) and make fewer returns (by -42% vs consumers). Business orders, on average, have lower ship cost per unit (by -12%) vs consumer orders¹. Many sellers note that relationship with business customers is smoother and more stable. The demand of business customers is less volatile, more recurrent than one-time purchasing: if a business customer is satisfied with the purchase, they often become a regular client.

“The average order value of B2B clients is higher compared to B2C orders as companies tend to buy in bulk and more recurrently. Additionally, the relationship with the client is very different, especially post-purchase: in every incidence, or return request, the process is smoother and more efficient vs a process with a B2C customer.” — Jesús González Burgos, Director and Founder, Clim Profesional, Spain

“Business customers are much less one-time buyers, they are repeated clients, they come back every time if they are happy.” — Aryeh Safern, CEO & Founder, Access King BVBA, Belgium

“Amazon Business allows me to reach business customers who place larger orders and make returns significantly less often.” — Keith Kemp, Kemp IT, US

At the same time, business customers have special needs: they expect lower prices when buying larger quantities, anticipate delivery within business hours, and often need to apply buying policies of their companies. Also, business customers have region-specific requirements like invoices for their orders in the EU, or certifications of the suppliers in the US.

The good news is, Amazon Business has already created special tools to address these business customers’ needs, and those tools are available free of charge for all professional sellers on Amazon. To generate customer demand for our sellers, we offer business customers the same convenience that they are used to as a consumer buyer, and even more as we continue to invest in developing the services to better adapt to B2B customers’ needs: business pricing, delivery within business hours, Business Prime, and more. Making the Amazon Business a store of choice for business procurement, we develop the potential customer base for selling partners.

“We do a lot of shopping through Amazon Business. It’s convenient, and we can find the parts we need quickly and at great prices to best serve our customers.”—Luke Cillessen, Owner of Founders PCs., US

Unlocking the opportunity

There are three key reasons why sellers choose to sell on Amazon Business:

1.  Reach new customers
2.  Benefit from Amazon's outstanding customer awareness and trust
3.  Grow sales with higher order volumes from business customers

Amazon Business enables sellers to unlock their potential to sell to B2B customers by making offers of all professional sellers available for business customers and providing selling partners with free B2B tools to attract those customers. Data shows that the effect of that empowerment is indeed impressive.

Amazon selling partners can unlock a lot of growth potential by enabling features for B2B Customers. While overall success is influenced by many factors like size, tenure, and specific attributes of the business, our internal data shows that our most successful selling partners (in terms of B2B sales) tend to use Amazon Business features. In fact, selling partners that have adopted three or more features have, on average, 1000x higher B2B sales than those who haven’t adopted any feature.²

“It’s really exciting to reach customers that you may never have been able to sell to without Amazon Business.” — Emma Haselip, Head of Marketplaces, Best4Systems, UK

Enabling selling partners to grow with powerful B2B tools

Amazon Business provides selling partners with functionality to set Business Prices and Quantity Discounts, because business customers tend to buy in bulk and hence expect lower prices for their purchases. We can see that this functionality is beneficial both to customers and selling partners: when offered a quantity discount, business customers tend to order three times more units on average.

“The impact of Amazon Business is that it’s changing procurement as an activity. Customers have access to hundreds of thousands of suppliers, which makes procurement more efficient, and dynamic pricing and discounts drive real value for businesses.” — Phil Vokins, Cloud Services Director, Intel Canada

As we observe that business customers look for specific B2B-relevant selection of products, we monitor and collect information on their demand. In a recommendation tool called B2B Product Opportunities (BPO), we share our knowledge on what products are in high demand by business customers, giving selling partners access to benefit from Amazon’s data and technology. Out of newly added ASINs in 2023, BPO ASINs saw 4X higher sales than non-BPO ASINs.

“All data is brilliant, especially if you can get that from Amazon themselves about what people are looking for, where there could be gaps in the market, and where we could fill them up. That’s exactly what everybody needs to grow their business.”- Emma Haselip, Head of Marketplaces, Best4Systems, UK

As business customers purchase more on Amazon Business, their specific needs become clearer too, particularly  the way they receive deliveries. As companies order in larger quantities, the timing of a delivery becomes more critical for them compared to individual buyers. Delivering products during business hours is a common requirement, because scenarios like unattended or lost packages could mean a loss for the business; and bulk quantities of products might need special handling and equipment like forklifts or personnel to receive. Catering to these needs ensures the business runs smoothly and  increases the probability that the business will entrust future purchases to the same selling partner. While Amazon uses its logistics network to fulfill this specific business need, Amazon Business recently launched the Business Hour Delivery Rate metric for selling partners who are using their preferred carrier partners for deliveries. The metric gives selling partners a sense of what percentage of their business orders are being delivered to customers at the right time, and on the first attempt. It also includes a detailed report with reasons for every miss, which will give selling partners the information they need to choose the best carrier for their business orders.Apart from features available globally (business pricing and selection recommendations), Amazon Business also supports selling partners with locally-relevant tools (like certifications in US, invoicing in EU).

In the US, Amazon Business customers have the ability to set Guided Buying policies that surface products from certified sellers and meet their diversity spend requirements. To increase visibility to these customers, sellers can add any relevant certifications, including small business and minority-owned certifications. In 2023, customers with Guided Buying policies spent more than $300 million on products sold by certified Selling Partners.

In European countries, business customers require invoices for their orders. To help sellers meet this need of business customers, Amazon Business introduced the VAT Calculation Service. This service automates invoicing on Amazon for selling partners and shows to business customers prices without the VAT. On average, selling partners who activated the VAT Calculation Service had 20% uplift in sales in the first year after enrolment.³

“Seeing the prices without VAT is also a very good feature for B2B customers, because you don’t want to take your calculator and calculate it yourself.” – Stephan Harpeng, CEO Assistant and Quality Manager, Tiga-Med, Germany

B2B e-commerce is a high-potential growing business

The global B2B e-commerce market was valued at over 7 trillion USD in 2022 and is forecasted to grow at CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 18-20% from 2023 to 2030.

Contributing to the growth of B2B e-commerce market, Amazon Business is one of the fastest growing ventures in Amazon history. It has grown over past 8 years from launch in US in 2015 to a $35Bn business with stores in 9 countries (US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and India), and over 50% of those sales are done by independent sellers, most of which are small and medium-sized businesses.  

Amazon Business provides all professional sellers with B2B tools, supports small business customers with grant awards, further develops customers features to make Amazon Business a choice for even more business customers.

We leverage the expertise and infrastructure of Amazon and adapt it for B2B, and will continue to invest in this relationship, further improving convenience for the business customers and enabling growth for the selling partners.

^{[1] Amazon internal data, 2021-2023}

^{[2] Amazon internal data, 2022-2023. It does not constitute a promise or guarantee of any kind regarding sales performance.}

^{[3] Amazon internal data, 2022-2023, it does not constitute a promise or guarantee of any kind regarding sales performance.}