Amazon Business, one of the company’s newest marketplaces, is on pace to explode in profits according to Amazon’s newest sales projections.
It’s time for you and your business to get involved in this area to help improve your connections and your profits.
What is Amazon Business?
Amazon Business launched in 2015 as a replacement for the old Amazon Supply marketplace. Amazon Business aims to streamline purchases and management for businesses of all sizes that need supplies to thrive. Business owners can sign up for accounts in the marketplace and take advantage of the many tools Amazon applies, such as purchase suggestions based on the type of business and shipping options specified for those companies.
It’s a versatile and flexible platform that has something for every type of business.
Amazon Business currently operates in eight different countries, including three new additions as of this year in Spain, France, and Italy. Amazon is very proud of its global outreach, according to its announcement this week:
Amazon Business is proud to serve millions of business customers and hundreds of thousands of business sellers around the world with more than $10 billion in annualized sales.
In the US alone, Amazon Business serves nearly 80% of the 100 largest enrollment education organizations, 55 of the Fortune 100 companies, more than half of the 100 biggest hospital systems and more than 40% of the 100 most populous local governments.
What’s the Latest News with Amazon Business?
According to Amazon’s recently announced projections, Amazon Business is the company’s fastest-growing marketplace and is on track to reach $10 billion in revenue by the end of 2018.
That’s a ginormous increase from the $1 billion the marketplace surpassed just three years ago.
CNBC also points out that,
“Amazon Business is on a faster growth trajectory than any of the company’s other business units. For example, it took seven years for Amazon’s consumer marketplace to go from $1 billion to $10 billion in sales, while AWS surpassed the $10 billion sales milestone only in 2016 — 10 years after its launch.”
However, it’s not totally fair to compare the growth of Amazon Business to the Amazon consumer marketplace considering Amazon is a more popular brand now than it was in the early days of the consumer marketplace. It’ll be easier for Amazon properties to make large profits as the company widens its reach and makes Amazon Prime a more popular platform — recent estimates suggest that within a decade, 275 million people will have Amazon Prime accounts (that would equal 85% of the current population of the United States).
What will truly be telling is if Amazon Business actually surpasses Amazon’s consumer marketplace in revenue like many project it eventually will. The flexibility and depth that the service has will certainly help propel it towards the future; almost any type of business can find Amazon Business useful for their operations.
What’s the Impact on Third Party Sellers?
Amazon Business, like many of Amazon’s products, is powered in large part due to third party sellers.
According to Business Insider,
“half of sales on Amazon Business come from third-party sellers on the platform, and [Amazon Business] allowed smaller suppliers access to big businesses they otherwise wouldn’t be able to transact with.”
Exposure is the name of the game as an Amazon seller. You want more people to view your products. Who better to view your products than a large company who needs a lot of your product to thrive? Amazon Business is built to funnel businesses towards sellers’ products, which is crucial to building business relationships.
In its official announcement, Amazon proudly flaunted how much this service helps its third party merchants.
Our focus is on improving suppliers’ ability to reach more customers, and to make it easier for customers to buy from suppliers. Wholesale suppliers and distributors are just as much our customer as the end buyer.
Today, our third party sellers make up more than 50% of the $10 billion in global sales, allowing customers to find and purchase from new suppliers they might not have discovered. With Seller Credentials, customers can also meet purchasing needs with local, minority, and women-owned businesses.
Without a place like Amazon Business, it’s unlikely an online seller would be able to connect with these Fortune 500 companies and other big-time businesses.
Amazon Business Marketplace: Conclusion
Given how big of a contribution third party sellers make to Amazon Business, this seems like a perfect time to jump in on the marketplace and divulge in the profits to come. If the service really will grow at the rate that the company thinks it will, it’s going to be a terrific investment for you and your business.
I would be shocked if Amazon Business does end up becoming more profitable than the consumer marketplace, but the fact that the chance remains means that the gamble is worth taking.
Anders is a content creator for Rosenbaum Famularo, P.C., the law firm behind AmazonSellersLawyer.com. Anders will be earning his degree in journalism from Hofstra and has five years of professional journalism experience. He has written for numerous online and print publications including SB Nation and The Hofstra Chronicle.