Amazon Business debuts new technologies for business customers

Amazon Business, the company’s online business-to-business procurement store, recently unveiled a number of new technology features including the Amazon Business App Center, System for Cross-domain Identity Management and Integrated Quoting. Amazon Business also made a number of updates to its Budget Management and Guided Buying solutions. These technologies are designed to help large business customers, including multinational enterprises, universities, government agencies, education organizations and healthcare networks, simplify and modernize the way they shop for business supplies.

"Amazon Business wants to change how companies shop for supplies through our unmatched selection, deep discounts, and smart capabilities,” said Shelley Salomon, worldwide vice president of Amazon Business. “We don't just react to the biggest challenges our customers have shared with us; we get ahead of them with new technologies so our customers can use their resources to navigate the unexpected and continue expanding their business.”

Recent research conducted by Amazon Business revealed that U.S. procurement teams are struggling to drive efficiencies within their organization, with close to 49% of respondents reporting complexity of systems and multi-step processes as the main contributors to this problem. As a result, 95% of procurement leaders acknowledge that there’s a need to optimize their procurement functions. Specifically, respondents feel that business buying is cumbersome, convoluted and time-consuming. Instead of a convenient, intuitive and personalized experience, teams are spending too much time performing tasks related to processing orders and leaders see improved procurement tools as the solution for this challenge, the company said.

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To help address this challenge, Amazon Business has introduced and upgraded several tools available to business buyers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom and the United States, including:

• Amazon Business App Center is a new one-stop shop where business customers can discover, quickly set-up and connect their Amazon Business account with more than 25 third-party applications from around the world. Solutions in the App Center include integrated shopping, accounting management, expense management, inventory management, rewards and recognition and business analytics. The App Center helps save leaders time and money through a single point of discovery as well as eliminating or reducing the need to develop a custom solution for their organization.
• System for Cross-domain Identity Management is a new feature that automatically syncs users and group data from their organization’s identity provider with their Amazon Business account. This feature helps administrators spend less time on maintaining and updating their Amazon Business account.
• Budget Management streamlines the process of setting and reviewing time-bound budgets across an organization. Now, business customers can set spend thresholds and make budget amounts visible to buyers to get ahead of overspending. Amazon Business also launched new ways for leaders to actively manage their budgets including real-time tracking and usage reports, notifications when a budget is about to expire, pre-purchase approvals and an option to create one purchase order instead of multiple, manual orders. These updates empower procurement buyers to make informed purchasing decisions for their organization while reducing the amount of time leaders spend auditing their purchases.

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• Guided Buying makes it easier for leaders to manage employee spending by steering buyers to purchase decisions that align with their organization’s preferences and goals. Through a new toolbar, account administrators can now instantly prefer products with sustainability certifications in the Climate Pledge Friendly program with a single click. Leaders also can restrict, block and require an approval for certain product categories with an eligible Business Prime plan. Through easy-to-follow visuals, Guided Buying helps procurement leaders save time educating their employees on what items they should or should not purchase.
• Integrated Quoting is a new feature that helps business customers generate custom quotes for Amazon Business bulk orders as well as other suppliers via third-party e-sourcing and e-procurement platforms. Integrated Quoting is ideal for business customers purchasing more than 1,000 items or more than $10,000 in total value. After requesting a bid, the feature centralizes an organization’s Request for Quote activity making it even easier for leaders to identify cost savings and select the most competitive bid.