Amazon Business customers across Europe accelerate digital transformation

Amazon Business ranges from sole proprietors to multinational enterprises with tens of thousands of employees on a single account.

Since launching in the U.S. in 2015, we have expanded to eight additional countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Canada and India – and reached $25 billion in worldwide annualized sales, more than half of which are from selling partners.

Across Europe, Amazon Business serves a diverse range of customers, including:

• More than 50% of FTSE 100, all of the 15 largest universities and six of the largest 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom
• 25 of the DAX-30, 13 of the biggest 15 Universities and 96 of the 100 largest cities in Germany
• 90% of the CAC 40, over 3,000 schools and universities and over 300 hospitals, clinics and nursing homes in France
• 53% of the FTSE MIB, 20 of the universities in IT and thousands of non-profit organizations in Italy
• 54% of the IBEX 35 and over 1,650 schools and universities in Spain

Multinational enterprises from all industries – including retail, healthcare, and automotive – purchase from our selection of hundreds of millions of products in categories like office, IT, janitorial, PPE, and professional medical supplies. In Europe, there are millions of items with an available business discount giving customers more value for their money.

Amazon Business offers a set of features that suit the needs of multinational enterprises, such as business-only pricing and selection, single or multi-user business accounts, Business Prime, approval workflow, purchasing system integrations, payment solutions, dedicated customer support, to name a few.

Since enterprise customers often utilize third-party solutions, including Enterprise Resource Planning systems such as SAP, and Spend Management systems like Coupa and Ariba, Amazon Business integrates directly into more than one hundred of these to enable real time access to millions of products, streamline expense management processes, and digitize purchase orders and invoices, lowering overall cost of operations.

Historically, small and medium-sized businesses have struggled to sell their products to multinational enterprises, often because they lack the resources to reach them. What makes Amazon Business unique is that we enable our selling partners to reach new business buyers such as multinational enterprises, universities, government agencies, and healthcare organizations. In fact, enterprise customers across Europe increased their spending year-over-year with selling partners.

We help with infrastructure, personnel, tools, and services. As a company, Amazon spends billions of dollars every year to help small and medium-sized businesses around the globe succeed. These selling partners range from manufacturers of quality consumer electronics and IT equipment, independent office supply resellers, international online bookstores, to family-owned businesses selling appliances for the home and office.

Here’s what one of our selling partners had to say:

“Darren Wilson is just one of the business owners to benefit, as Director of DKW IT Consultancy Services: “Our experience with Amazon Business has been a great journey – the volume of sales we are receiving through Amazon is much greater compared with our previous channels. We have been able to leverage an established B2B customer base on Amazon Business and we realized that adding business-relevant products bring a significant increase in our revenue.”

“We were especially pleased to get orders not just from large entities but also from business customers of all types and sizes which grew our B2B segment to almost 50% of our total sales,” Darren adds.

Similarly, we've compiled our best resources to also help public sector customers across the UK, Germany and France with their digital procurement efforts from hospitals, to healthcare, childcare and schools to government organizations. In addition, Amazon Business helps public entities achieve their spending requirements with small to medium-size businesses. In the UK, Germany and France alone, an increasing number of public sector customers are purchasing items from selling partners including education supplies, business books, site and safety equipment, office supplies, IT equipment, and many more.

One of our customers in the public sector, Kyush Modasia, Director Finance for Academies Enterprise Trust, said: “We had an operational model that was equivalent to 58 different entities all working in silo. There was a drastic need to improve system processes that were central to our new operational model. Centralization helped us bring all our academies together in one place – so that finance operated as one function. This was key to improving our financial reporting.”

In addition, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, Amazon Business helped to get critical medical supplies and PPE - such as digital thermometers, ventilators, face masks and sanitizers - to nearly 3,000 healthcare and government organizations in Europe.

Amazon is committed to building a sustainable business for our customers and the planet. We co-founded the Climate Pledge in 2019, committing Amazon to be net zero carbon across all our businesses by 2040 — a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement’s goal of 2050. We help Amazon Business Customers procure more sustain-ably.

As part of the Climate Pledge Friendly program, they can discover and purchase a growing selection of business relevant items such as paper towels, printer paper, HDMI cables, face masks, monitors, and laptops that are already certified with recognized labels such as the Energy Star, EPEAT and Compact by Design which is a new externally-validated certification created by Amazon to identify products which are designed with less air and water so they are more efficient to ship.

Compact by Design is a new externally validated certification created by Amazon - to identify products which are designed with less air and water, so they are more efficient to ship.

The Climate Pledge Friendly program features tens of thousands of items and we add more selection every day, giving procurement leaders the opportunity to focus on digital transformation at the same time as acting sustain-ably.

Looking ahead, we continue listening to feedback from customers and selling partners. We are obsessed with innovating on their behalf to deliver what they need to be successful in meeting the demands of the future workplace. We are excited about what we have accomplished over the last six years, and look forward to what lies ahead.

To find out more visit the Amazon Business Storefront.