Amazon Business was launched to increase customer convenience by leveraging the power of tailored benefits to small and medium sized businesses. It was rolled by the tech giant in April 2015 and promised customers its free two-day shipping on ‘tens of millions’ of eligible items, payment solutions, and dedicated customer support.
What You Can Expect From Amazon Business
Amazon Business is a premium purchasing solution platform for registered businesses of any size. These businesses can assign users to purchase business supplies for their employer using Amazon. The main administrator gets special privileges such as adding authorized users, removing them as needed, and managing different payment methods, shipping addresses, restoring options, etc., based on the needs of their business.
Why Amazon Business is Useful
It all comes down to exclusive price savings that businesses can benefit with Amazon Business. This benefit extends to shipping costs as well. To qualify, users have to purchase a business user account through Amazon.com. Some of the benefits account holders receive include price breaks on multi unit purchases. This gives users a bird’s eye view of prices offered from multiple sellers and price cuts on millions of business products.
Businesses can use quantity discounts from several sellers of their choice.
For shipping, users can tie their existing Prime account to their business account at no additional cost. Users also get free two-day shipping on select items. This benefit is only available to single user business accounts. Businesses that don’t already have a Prime shipping account can add one to their business account based on the number of users or employees they currently have.
The price point for 10 users is $499, and if there are 100 users, the price is $1,299 a year. But you don’t have to start paying right out of the gate, you can always sign up for a free 30 day trial to see if Amazon Business really is the right step for you.
Payment Options
Perhaps the biggest advantage with Amazon Business is that users can receive standardized invoices by managing a single payment platform with Amazon Business and retaining the ability to purchase from millions of suppliers.
Users with administrator privileges can add individual or shared payment options to their Amazon Business account. Shared payment methods mean credit cards, debit cards, and Amazon.com corporate credit line. All authorized users will be able to use their registered card but will only see the last four digits to ensure maximum security.
Businesses can use their Amazon Corporate Credit Line to expand user and management options, authorize several buyers on a single account, and download order history reports, among others. Users no longer have to bother with endless streams of complex paperwork because Amazon gives them easy to understand statements without any annual fees attached.
How Small Businesses can Benefit from Amazon Business
Amazon offers many small businesses the opportunity to benefit from tax exemption under their Amazon Tax Exemption Program (ATEP). Users will be given a tool to see if they qualify for tax exemption and then further refine the selection process by showing them a list of exemption types that their business can benefit from.
Users that have administrator privileges can go through the process to set it up for their business account. Amazon Business allows its users to apply their tax exempt status on certain items from Amazon and its associated groups. If you don’t want an Amazon Business account, you can still benefit from Amazon’s tax exemption.
All of Amazon’s powerful tools can be accessed on their supply chain purchasing process with their integrated analytics dashboard. This is where users can look at their spending activity, total costs on purchases, and their type of spend level. This gives small business sellers the unique opportunity to grow their sales by connecting with millions of business customers across the globe.
How to Start Your Amazon Business Account
The first step is to create your business account using your work email. You can use your existing account to register your company with Amazon Business. After clicking on “Create a Free Account” you will need to sign in with your work email and then enter details about your organization, including business name, contact information, credit card information, and address.
Manage Your Users
Account administrators can add as many users as needed to a single Amazon Business account. Adding users gives them access to payment methods that have been selected for your company’s procurement process.
Individual users can be made into account administrators, where they can benefit from a slew of advantages including managing roles, viewing orders, running order reports, and adding users as buyers who can place orders for approval.
Using Your Tax-exempt Status
To benefit from any tax-exempt benefits your business is currently enrolled in, you will still need to enroll your entire organization and users in ATEP. All buyers are eligible for tax exempt purchases by default, but administrators can disable tax exemptions for certain users or group within their Amazon Business account.
Getting in Touch with Your Favorite Suppliers
Amazon Business uses its advanced algorithms to create efficient procurement teams and reducing the number of suppliers that need to be individually managed. Users can benefit from real time pricing completion among their favorite suppliers and grow their list of sellers by adding them to their Saved Suppliers list.
The Saved Suppliers list allows users to buy from their favorite suppliers, explore between a myriad of offerings from their saved suppliers, and connect with them by asking questions.
Using Real Time Analytics About Purchases
Amazon is known for offering powerful analytics that are easy to use and interpret for understanding user purchase activity. With Amazon Business Analytics, you can answer essential questions about your business using information gathered about your purchase activity. This data is collected from several sources and it could be internal or external.
Different teams within your organization would gain access to relevant tools to gain insights about the business. A finance manager will want to look at metrics across all lines of businesses and will be interested in expenses, currency exchange rates, and taxes.
Marketing managers would want to know about the number of leads, opportunities, and closed deals, while the sales manager would want to focus on their daily quota to achieve and funnel as many leads into the sales pipeline as possible.
At the end of the day, it’s good to have Amazon’s enterprise side for your business.