Delivering a delightful buying experience to your entire company with Business Prime

Amazon Business launched in 2015 with a goal of addressing the needs of business customers who loved shopping on Amazon. These customers had specific unmet expectations for business purchasing in the consumer-centric experience. Amazon Business now provides “Everything you love about Amazon, for your Business.” Right from the start, some of our most enthusiastic customers were Prime members. It turns out that business customers loved fast, free shipping and wanted business benefits too.

Business Customer Challenges

Our customers, as Jeff Bezos puts it, are “divinely discontent.” We heard from customers that managing purchasing for work can be a challenge, whether it is a sole proprietor looking to separate their work and personal purchases, or a large organization looking to modernize their procurement function. Businesses of all sizes continue to seek ways to extend their cash and access shipping options to meet their needs.

When purchasing for business, buyers want the same speed, selection and convenience they are used to when shopping at home. Business purchasing can involve unknown shipping costs and a range of suppliers, stemming from a lack of transparency with confusing and different minimum thresholds, eligibility criteria, and varying prices for shipping.

At the same time, managers need to ensure their buyers adhere to their organization’s purchasing goals. They lack insight into purchases when buyers shop outside of their approved suppliers, resulting in lost control and extra time spent creating custom analysis to track this rogue spending. This problem affects organizations that are in various maturity stages of procurement, from no formal purchasing department to organically grown group policies to centralized procurement. Within each stage, organizations need efficient ways to gain insight into their spending and use this insight to meet purchasing goals.

They need to have flexible payment options to meet the needs of the business at just the right time. Finally, they need to optimize their deliveries for their unique need, such as speed, consolidation, and predictability.

Business Prime

Customers love Prime, and business customers are no exception. In fact, employees are already using Amazon and Prime for work. Organizations often pay for individual Prime memberships for each employee that needs to make purchases. These metrics inspired us to create a scalable program designed for businesses. It would provide benefits that buyers love with tools and features for procurement professionals. Business Prime provides business customers the familiar Prime shopping experience employees love at home, with plans and benefits suited for work.

Business Prime gives you the best of Amazon for business. With Business Prime, simplify business purchasing and empower your team to buy through the familiar Amazon experience. Your team can get what they need when they need it, and you can set policies to guide them to the products and sellers that satisfy your organizational purchasing goals. Analyze your purchases more quickly with custom charts and graphs choose from hundreds of millions of products, and benefit from Amazon’s fulfillment expertise. Eligible customers can benefit from flexible payment options with extended terms or invoicing. Business Prime can help you simplify purchasing so you can focus on your customers.

Business Prime is designed for businesses of all sizes and offers a variety of benefits depending on the plan. Benefits available to customers include:

• Spend Visibility: Powered by AWS QuickSight, Spend Visibility provides advanced visualizations of company spend in ready-to-present graphics, freeing up the time it takes to download and analyze data and discover spending trends.
• Guided Buying: Guided Buying enables Amazon Business account administrators to identify certain suppliers and products as preferred, as well as set specific product categories as restricted, offering buyers greater insight into company policies or recommendations while shopping and helping businesses reduce rogue spend, improve compliance and consolidate suppliers.
• Extended Terms for Pay by Invoice: Business Prime members can now request Extended Terms for Pay by Invoice. Qualifying customers can extend their payment terms to 45 or 60 days, depending on their plan, to pay an Amazon Business invoice so they have more flexibility and can better manage their cash flow.
• Unlimited Fast FREE Business Delivery: Business Prime members enjoy FREE One-Day Shipping on millions of items — order today and “Get it Tomorrow,” and members can choose FREE Same-Day Delivery for more than 3 million items on eligible orders over $35. Simply look for items marked as eligible for delivery today as you search and browse throughout the site.
• Predictable and Convenient Shipping: Amazon Day gives Business Prime members the option to choose a day of the week for their packages to arrive, making it easy for customers to group and receive purchases, and, in many cases, in fewer boxes. Members can still choose from Business Prime’s fast, free business delivery options for any item they do not want to include as part of their Amazon Day shipment. Members also have the option to choose Consolidated Shipping on eligible bulk orders to receive their order in fewer shipments.
• Member-Only Offers: Get access to deals and promotions just for Business Prime members. Eligible members can get six months of QuickBooks Online Plus for FREE — up to $360 value to keep track of your business purchases and organize expenses in one place.

And it’s just the beginning, or as we at Amazon say, it’s still Day 1. We will continue to add benefits, offers and features to meet the needs of our customers. Our focus is to put so much value in Business Prime that it would be irresponsible for any business not to be a member. Learn more about Amazon Business and start a free 30-day trial of Business Prime at www.amazon.com/businessprime.

At Amazon Business Prime, Muskaan Rataul is a Principle Program Manager and Kunal Patel is a Senior Manager, Product Management Technical.