Amazon Business Is Good For Your Business
If you could tap into one of the fastest-growing and biggest potential in Amazon… would you do it? What if you did not have to source new products and suppliers to make this happen? Amazon Business is the opportunity you’ve been looking for. Over the past two years, the Amazon B2B program has quietly grown from 1 Billion to over 10 billion. This is just their start.
It is easy as a brand or seller to overlook programs that are right in front of us because we do not have the insight with what is important to Amazon’s internal goals. The Amazon Business programs present the greatest opportunities to grow your sales on Amazon today and over the next 5-7 years.
What Is Amazon Business?
It is the same platform that customers are accustomed to with a separate entry and additional business features and products. It is a filter that companies can use to buy products from other businesses with the same confidence and easy-to-use experience they are already used to. Companies that purchase products with an Amazon Business account can benefit from bulk quantity discounts, tools for managing accounts like Guided Buyer Blocking and Spend Visibility Policy Adherence Dashboards, and the ability to request quotes for bulk buys. What makes the Amazon Business platform exciting for your growth is not just these features but the marketplace growth potentials.
The numbers according to Amazon:
55% of Fortune 100 companies buy
PLUS 50% of the largest 100 US Hospital Systems
PLUS 40% of the top 100 largest local governments.
Why Does Amazon Business Matter To Your Business?
B2B buyers embrace digital-first purchasing. Businesses shop the same way that they shop as consumers. A new generation of customers are comfortable shopping online and skipping the trips to retail locations. According to Amazon, they are connecting millions of business customers and sellers worldwide. Amazon Business serves sole proprietors to large enterprises with tens of thousands of employees on a single account. We serve millions of businesses worldwide, including hospitals, universities, Fortune 50 companies, government agencies, daycares, restaurants, and more. Seller certifications for your business like local, minority or women-owned businesses can help you find more customers in the business markets who need your products. Think of Amazon Business as the introduction to small businesses and government buyer. Do you sell internationally? Amazon Business is live in Canada, United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and India. Amazon business will keep growing and you need to be part of this growth.
How Do I Get Started In Amazon Business?
Sign up for an Amazon Business Selling Account. The suite of tools will enable you to reach millions of business customers using the trusted Amazon experience. This program is free to existing Professional Sellers.
Create a Business Profile. Tell your unique story. Add your quality certifications and diversity credentials for customer viewing to help you stand out from the crowd. Adding certifications enables Amazon business customers to search and filter for small and diverse sellers.
Set up your products. The simple listing tools can be used to add your entire catalog. The Enhanced content features for business offer the ability to display additional product information to your customers. There is NO LIMIT to the categories that can participate.
B2B Central. These links will help you understand, manage and grow your Amazon Business Sales.
Use Pricing Wisely – Discount pricing does not need to break the bank. Consider setting your first level business discounts as natural case packs of your products to reduce your costs in processing and shipping.
Negotiated Pricing – Do you have customers who are buying on a standard discount price list that are small and could benefit from utilizing the Amazon portals? You can set these for your customers and let Amazon Business handle these sales for you with “Negotiated Pricing”.
Respond to Business Quote Requests – Set quantity discounts by the response to dates to increase your chances of winning the initial and future sales. This price discount will be available to all business customers.
Create Business – Only offers that are exclusive to Amazon Business customers and are not seen by the typical Amazon consumer.
What do you have to lose? Amazon Business is good for your business, so get involved in this opportunity today.
The Prime Guidance Team can help you and your team develop a strategy for Amazon Business. Contact Prime Guidance today or speak to your Consultant for the great sales opportunity available with Amazon Business.
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Amazon Suspends FBA Shipments For Non-Essential Items In Response To Coronavirus COVID-19
According to Fulfillment by Amazon, the Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has been greatly impacting Amazon customers, sellers, and employees.
Since people are staying in their homes trying to prevent the COVID-19 from spreading any further, online shopping has increased dramatically leaving household items low in quantity or completely out of stock. Due to this dilemma, Amazon has chosen to temporarily prioritize household items such as staples, medical supplies, and other high demand products that have been entering their fulfillment centers in order to quickly obtain, restock, and deliver products to customers as fast as possible.
Amazon says that for any other products than these, they have temporarily disabled FBA shipments and they are taking a similar approach with retail vendors as well. This will be in effect until April 5th 2020. Amazon will communicate when they resume their regular operations. Any shipments created before March 17th 2020 will be received at Fulfillment centers. You can learn more about this on this Help page. It’s also important to note that Selling Partner Support does not presently have any further guidance.
Amazon understands how this change might impact our businesses and says how they most certainly did not take this decision lightly. They are working as hard as they can to increase capacity and are trying to quickly hire 100,000 new full and part-time positions at fulfillment centers across the US. They thank their Amazon customers, sellers, and employees for their understanding and patience as they prioritize the above products in response to COVID-19.
What Actions Could You Take?
- Consider increasing quantities on any pending orders by up to 5% without penalty
- Ensure that you have a back-up means of fulfilling inventory, such as your own warehouse or 3PL to do fulfillment. We advise all clients to create a duplicate SKU for each ASIN, one is used for FBA and one is merchant fulfilled or SFP. This is allowed by Amazon and is a good tactic to ensure sales momentum is not impacted greatly when you run out of stock in FBA. You should also be exploring alternative fulfillment to diversify into other channels such as Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a means of diversifying your sales revenue through multiple channels
- Consider adjusting your prices to maintain a run rate that does not run out of stock, but be careful not to increase prices too drastic or Amazon may suspend your buy box eligibility due to price gouging concerns
- If you have a regular cadence of planned inventory allocations to Amazon, you will want to account for this impact by increasing future shipments as needed
- Many sellers are seeing decreased sales of non-essential product sales recently, so you may find that additional inventory is not needed and this may be good to keep inventory balances in check
If you have questions about selling on Amazon, optimizing your listings and advertising campaigns to peak performance, please contact Prime Guidance for a free account consultation at info@primeguidance.com.
Author | Claudia Yates, Marketing Specialist
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