SMB Buying Guide

Your guide to buying 

Simplify team purchasing

For many SMBs, purchasing often falls under the responsibility of employees who wear multiple hats, such as office managers, operations leads, or leaders themselves. As a result, the process needs to be simple and fast for procurement teams and easy to follow for users. Digital procurement tools can also help track spending, improve communication, and provide a centralized place to access vendors and data. By setting up internal buying policies and workflows in place, SMBs can manage business purchases, spot savings, and maintain control, all while keeping the process straightforward. A digital-forward solution can help streamline, boost operational efficiency, and keep teams organized.

Track and review spending

Growing businesses need visibility into their spending to maintain financial health and resilience. Purchasing analytics tools provide insights into spending patterns, key suppliers, and savings opportunities. With real-time reports, businesses can track monthly purchases, category spend, and shipping costs. For SMBs, these tools turn spending data into practical cost-saving decisions, help them anticipate needs, and plan for growth.

"Amazon Business has the most robust reporting system for analyzing and understanding our spend and business, allowing for much less manual analyzation on our part. Time spent by our stores on ordering.. has gone down significantly, too. We are saving hours in payroll each month." - Rachel Jacobs, Operations Manager, The Paper Store

Keep the process consistent

A consistent purchasing process improves operational efficiency and reduces common purchasing errors like understocking and unauthorized spending. Digital tools like Business Lists help SMBs streamline reordering by allowing buyers to store frequently purchased items, making it easy to quickly reorder and maintain consistency. Additionally, Approval Workflows helps ensure that only authorized purchases are made by routing approvals through designated decision makers.

Set clear purchasing guidelines: who can buy, how requests are submitted, and who approves them. Moreover, using a single business purchasing account with the ability to add multiple users allows SMBs to track purchases, reconcile transactions, and monitor delivery status in one place, keeping everything organized. This reduces communication delays, improves spend oversight, and minimizes process confusion.

This approach not only makes onboarding new employees easier, but also helps mitigate errors, save time, and lead to more predictable purchasing outcomes.

"The fact that Amazon Business saves even more than a personal Prime account is the absolute best part about the program, hands down. Layer in the ability...to have assigned ordering permissions for your employees, and to have multiple locations under one login, and you save time and money." - Kristin Kidd, COO, Head to Toe Brands

Adapt to economic shifts 

SMBs are often affected by broader economic changes, such as fluctuations in market demand, shifts in commodity prices, or changes in supply chain dynamics. Having a flexible purchasing process enables businesses to quickly adjust to these changes and maintain continuity in operations.

Having access to an extensive network of vendors in one centralized location provides SMBs with the flexibility to find alternatives when needed. This approach reduces reliance on a single supplier or needing to go to multiple sources and helps ensure business operations and growth are not affected by changes in supply availability. It is also important for businesses to identify backup suppliers for critical products in advance, allowing for quicker adaptation when circumstances change.

Regularly reviewing supplier relationships, including pricing, lead times, and service levels, helps SMBs stay ahead of potential challenges. By building a purchasing process that is both adaptable and proactive, businesses can position themselves to handle changes in the economic environment without sacrificing control over spending or efficiency.

"In some commodities, [with Amazon Business], we do see a drop in costs and improvement on availability and lead times in particular in electronics.” - Sascha Holtke-Tuchtfeld, Head of Procurement and Supply Chain Management, Agile Robots

Consolidate supplier selection

Amazon Business does the hard work of vendor management, bringing together hundreds of thousands of sellers competing to offer a wide selection of products at competitive prices, all with the reliable and convenient delivery experience you are used to from Amazon.