Amazon Business has arrived in the UK, an online marketplace which allows businesses to sell to other companies.
The new offering is a free upgrade to Amazon’s Professional Selling plan that provides a feature set tailored for business-to-business (B2B) sales, and offers EU-wide selling, enabling the export of goods abroad for a wider potential audience.
Vendors can also set up exclusive offers for business customers, and volume purchasing discounts. The Amazon Business store uses VAT-exclusive prices, and automatic VAT invoicing, as well as software to track spending.
According to Amazon, there will be over a hundred million products on the new B2B store, ranging from typical office supplies and stationery to more niche items like laboratory equipment.
Big business
The service is already up and running in the US and Germany, and it’s now servicing more than 400,000 businesses over in the States, having seen over $1 billion (around £800 million) worth of sales in the first year, Amazon says.
The US operation was launched back in April 2015, with Germany getting Amazon Business at the end of last year – the latter now has over 50,000 business customers, apparently.
The business-to-business market in the UK is worth almost £97 billion, going by statistics from the ONS – and that was using figures from 2015, so doubtless the value has increased by now.
Bill Burkland, Head of Amazon Business in the UK, told the BBC that the service would boast “a new set of unique business features – from reporting and analytics to spending limits and purchasing workflow approvals”.
You can register for, and check out all the FAQs regarding Amazon’s fresh offering right here.
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