Amazon Business Review: Is It Really More Cost Effective?

Are you looking for easy, affordable, and streamlined ordering for all of your business products?

That’s the tagline online retail giant Amazon.com uses for its Amazon Business service. It offers businesses of all sizes a simple solution to streamline your buying process.

Does it live up to the hype? Our experts investigate.

Visit the Amazon Business Website

What Is Amazon Business?

Online retail giant Amazon rolled out its Amazon Business marketplace in 2015 to provide businesses streamlined and reliable purchasing solutions. Registered companies have access to hundreds of millions of products, everything from IT to food service supplies. And many items are business-only offers with special pricing for account holders. 

7 Key Benefits

Here is a snapshot of some of the key benefits:

1. Free two-day shipping on millions of eligible items
2. Multi-user business accounts
3. Approval workflows
4. Various payment solutions
5. Reporting options
6. Tax exemptions
7. Dedicated customer support

Pricing

There is currently no cost to set up your business account. But, you will need to setup a new Amazon login with your work email to set up your free account. And if you choose to take advantage of their Prime service (unlimited free 2-day shipping on most products), the costs are as follows.

Prime Memberships

There are four price-tiers for an Amazon Business Prime membership:

1. Essentials – $179/ year for up to 3 users
2. Small – $499/ year for up to 10 users
3. Medium – $1,299/ year for up to 100 users
4. Enterprise – $10,099/ year for over 100 users

30-Day Free Trial

You can sign up for a free 30-day trial. And you can apply your Amazon Prime shipping benefits to your Amazon Business account at no additional cost.

Amazon Business Account Benefits

Let’s take a closer look at the specific benefits you get with an Amazon Business account.

Product Selection, Pricing Benefits, And Discounts

Amazon Business features business-only pricing with discounts on millions of products across Amazon. Many discounts aren’t available to regular Amazon users. You get handy price comparison tools where you can see multiple offers from numerous sellers on a single page.

You can also request quantity discounts from some sellers.

Does your company have procurement requirements? You can search sellers by attributes including small business, women-owned, and minority-owned.

Account Management

Amazon Business accounts allow you to manage multiple users within your company. Administrators of the main account can add and manage multiple business-account users and features, such as payment methods and shipping addresses, approval workflows, and reporting options.

Sync With Your POS

Once you have an Amazon Business account, you can use their self-registration tool to enable Amazon on more than 50 commonly-used purchasing (POS) systems. And if they don’t have your platform, you can request that they add it.

Payment Solutions

Amazon Business offers several payment options, from a company-wide purchasing card to its corporate line of credit. Amazon.com Corporate Credit Lines offer some handy user and management options, including the ability to authorize multiple buyers on a single account, download order history reports, and pay by purchase orders. And you can enroll in the Amazon Tax Exemption Program if your organization is eligible for tax-exempt purchasing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here’s questions we’ve received from our readers regarding Amazon. Don’t see yours? Ask us in the comments!

Is It Possible To Retroactively Apply Amazon Smile To A Purchase?

Amazon Smile is, unfortunately, being discontinued, but nevertheless this question continues to pour in, so we’re going to keep the answer up a while longer.

Question: I keep trying to remember to type in smile.amazon.com when visiting Amazon so I get the half percent donated to my charity. The problem is, I recently made a couple big Christmas purchases and forgot to do them through the Smile site. Amazon Help’s solution was to cancel the order, return it for a full refund, and re-issue the order from the Amazon Smile. This seems terribly inefficient to me, not to mention the environmental impact of shipping things back-and-forth. Has anyone had any luck getting an Amazon smile purchase applied retroactively?

Answer: You can create a redirect in your browser (code below), which is rather technical. The easier solution is to use a browser extension (or add-on), however we urge you to use these with caution since they’re able to access your data. Since Amazon Smile is being discontinued, we’ve removed links to our recommended solutions.

Example URL: //www.amazon.com

Include Pattern: https?://(www.|)amazon.com/(.*)

Redirect To: //smile.amazon.com/$2

Pattern Type: Regular Expression

Amazon Business Tour (Video)

Check out this brief video tour of Amazon Business.

Our Experts’ Office Equipment Guide

Visit the Amazon Business Website

Whether or not you choose to buy your business equipment through Amazon Business, the next step will be deciding what equipment to buy. Do you really need a fax machine? Our experts have reviewed top business products and equipment to help streamline your workflow, save costs, and increase workforce efficiency. Get this and more in our office equipment guide, which also contains how-to’s and step-by-step guides on implementing a healthy balanced workplace.

Signing up or passing on Amazon Business? Let us know in the comments!