Amazon Business hits $10 billion in annual sales

Amazon CEO Jeff
Bezos.
Reuters

• Amazon Business, which specialises in selling goods to
  businesses, has hit $10 billion in annual sales worldwide.
• Amazon launched the new business line in 2015. It stocks over
  250 million products and has special business-friendly features,
  such as VAT receipt services.
• Growth is accelerating and the UK head of Amazon Business
  says the company is doubling down on the platform.

Amazon said on Tuesday that its specialist business supplies
sales portal has now hit $10 billion in annual sales.

Founded in 2015, Amazon Business functions just like regular
Amazon but is specialised to suit the needs of businesses,
offering things like separate VAT pricing and receipts.

It’s the first time Amazon has published global numbers for
Amazon Business. The company said it now has millions of
customers for the service and hundreds of thousands of vendors on
the marketplace.

Bill Burkland, UK head of Amazon Business, told Business Insider:
“To have launched a business in April 2015 in the US and just
over three years later to announce $10 billion in annualized
sales is certainly a reflection that this is a big and
fast-growing business.”

Bill Burkland, UK Head of
Amazon Business.
Amazon

Amazon Business currently operates eight marketplaces in
countries such as the USA, Japan, Germany, and the UK. These
marketplaces ship products to businesses in over 70 countries.

The service launched in France, Italy, and Spain this year and
Burkland said international expansion was helping to fuel Amazon
Business’s growth, which is accelerating.

“We’ve also launched some interesting features that we can see
businesses are finding of value,” Burkland said. “One of those is
catalogue curation, which allows a customer to take the 250
million products that are in the Amazon business catalogue and it
allows them to create preferred sellers, for example, they can
restrict products, they can set policies that allow them to
ensure that they’ll get a downloadable VAT invoice.”

Burkland said the most popular products on Amazon Business are
“things like PC and computer peripherals, office products,
janitorial products, things of that nature that really are used
across all businesses.”

He added: “One of the reasons that businesses are finding Amazon
Business valuable is that breadth of selection. Just about
anything that may come up as a need for a business and that’s
whether you’re a construction company or a manufacturer or a
legal firm or high tech — we have the breadth.”

50% of sales on Amazon Business come from third parties selling
on the platform and Burkland said it allows smaller suppliers
access to big businesses they otherwise wouldn’t be able to
transact with. Amazon said on Tuesday that 50% of FTSE 100
companies are now using its platform, for example.

“The business community can reach a set of customers that would
be very difficult to reach outside of a marketplace like Amazon
Business,” Burkland said.

“Just to bring that home, if you think about the type of
businesses that Amazon Business sells to — the FTSE 100 companies
— those are often very difficult for a smaller seller to be able
to sell to. Amazon Business is a channel that allows them to
reach those types of customers.”

Burkland declined to talk about Amazon’s specific future plans
for Amazon Business but said: “What you can count on are the
major themes that we have focused on for the first three years,
we’ll continue to focus on for the immediate and distant futures.

“Those fall around continuing to drive innovation and roll out
new features, it involves building our selection, continuing
focus on bringing in new products and adding depth to the
categories that we sell in.”