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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.
Article Overview
- What Is Amazon Business?
- Account Benefits
- Tour Of Amazon Business (Video)
- What’s The Best Office Equipment?
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.
Key Benefits
Here is a snapshot of some of the key benefits:
- Free two-day shipping on millions of eligible items
- Multi-user business accounts
- Approval workflows
- Various payment solutions
- Reporting options
- Tax exemptions
- 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:
- Essentials – $179/ year for up to 3 users
- Small – $499/ year for up to 10 users
- Medium – $1,299/ year for up to 100 users
- 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.
Amazon Business Tour (Video)
Check out this brief video tour of Amazon Business.
Our Experts’ Office Equipment Guide
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.
What challenges does your company face with office supply purchasing?
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I love that you can filter for procurement requirements by attributes such as women or minority-owned. But our company also has a requirement to only purchase products made in the USA.
I don’t suppose Amazon Business will ever offer an attribute filter to find American manufactured products? They sure haven’t made an effort on the consumer side.
Hi Joseph,
Unfortunately, we have yet to see a “made in USA” filter option applied to the consumer or business side of Amazon. Rest assured you’re not alone, the demand for this is massive!
Meanwhile, companies will sometimes list “Made in USA” in the “About” or “Key Features” section of their listing. You can also Google the company name and see if anything comes up. Make sure, if you find the merchant’s website, that they have an actual address in the U.S. And if you really want to make sure, give them a call and ask them where their products are manufactured.
I recently signed up for Amazon Business (why not it’s Free) but haven’t been able to take advantage of it’s perks yet (already have prime). I do enjoy the PO feature to assign when you purchase something business related.