Amazon Business (B2B on Amazon)
Quantity discounts on Amazon Business are tiered unit prices you attach to an ASIN, shown only to business customers, that drop the price once a buyer orders at least a set number of units on a single line. You set them per ASIN in Manage Inventory or in bulk with a pricing file, choose up to a handful of tiers, and define each tier as either a fixed unit price or a reduction from your business price. The buyer sees a small table on the product page and pays the tier price automatically at checkout.
That is the mechanism. The decision is what the tiers should be, and that is where most sellers either give away margin they did not need to, or set tiers so timid that no buyer notices. This article works the arithmetic from FBA fees up, then checks each tier against the wholesale price you will eventually quote a distributor, because a tier that undercuts that price will cost you the channel.
How the tiers work on the listing
A business customer viewing your product sees the consumer price, your business price if you set one, and a quantity discount table if you set that. The table lists thresholds: at 10 units the price is X, at 25 it is Y, at 50 it is Z. The buyer enters a quantity, and the cart applies the matching tier. Tiers apply to the quantity on one order line, not across the buyer's history, so a customer who orders 8 units twice never reaches the 10-unit tier.
Quantity discounts are invisible to consumers. A shopper with a personal account sees the consumer price and nothing else. That is the reason the feature is safe to use on a listing where you also care about the consumer Buy Box: the discount does not leak.
You configure the tiers in the Business Price column of Manage Inventory, where each ASIN has a small editor for the business price and the discount tiers, or by uploading a price file that carries the same fields for many ASINs at once. If you use automated repricing on the consumer price, check whether the tool also touches business pricing; some do, and a repricer that lowers your consumer price under your business price makes the business price pointless.
Start from the unit economics, not from the discount
The mistake is to think in terms of a percentage off. Think in dollars per unit, because every unit still carries the same fees whether it is the first in an order or the fiftieth.
Take a $24 stainless water bottle sold through FBA. The referral fee on a $24 sale is about $3.60. The FBA fulfilment fee for an item of that size and weight is, say, $5.20. Landed cost from your manufacturer is $6.00. On a consumer sale your contribution before advertising is $24 minus $3.60 minus $5.20 minus $6.00, which is $9.20 a unit. If you spend $3 a unit on ads to get that consumer sale, you keep $6.20.
Now consider a business order of 25 units. The FBA fee is still charged per unit, because Amazon still picks, packs and ships each one, and the referral fee is still a share of the price. What changes is that you did not pay $3 of advertising per unit for that order, and the buyer may reorder without any advertising at all. So the discount you can afford at the 25-unit tier is roughly the advertising you saved, plus whatever share of the remaining margin you are willing to trade for a bigger order.
If your business price is $22.00, the 10-unit tier might be $21.00, the 25-unit tier $20.00 and the 50-unit tier $19.00. At $19.00 the referral fee drops to about $2.85, FBA is still $5.20, landed cost is still $6.00, and you keep $4.95 a unit with no ad spend. That is less than the $6.20 you keep on an advertised consumer sale, but it is on 50 units at once, with a buyer who has a reason to come back.
Run this calculation for every ASIN you want to tier. A heavy item with a large FBA fee has less room; a small, high-margin item has more. Never set a tier by copying the shape of someone else's table.
Where the tiers should stop
Quantity tiers have a floor, and it is not your cost. It is the price a distributor or a retailer pays you for the same product.
Suppose you plan to sell that water bottle to stores at $10.50 wholesale in cases of 12, and to a distributor at $9.00 because the distributor takes larger quantities and handles the stores. A store that sells the bottle at $24 makes $13.50 on each one. A distributor selling to that store at $10.50 makes $1.50 on each one and lives on volume.
Now imagine your 100-unit Amazon Business tier is $14.00. A store with an Amazon Business account can buy 100 units at $14.00, delivered, no freight, no minimum case, no credit application. Some will. And a distributor who notices will tell you they cannot compete with your own listing. You will have made a distributor's job impossible, for the sake of a tier almost no genuine end user needs.
So the floor for your lowest tier should sit comfortably above your wholesale price to a store, once the store's landed cost including freight is counted. If the store pays $10.50 plus about $1.00 a unit for freight, a lowest tier around $17.00 or $18.00 leaves them a clear reason to buy from you directly, with the price difference paying for the paperwork. If you do not yet have a wholesale price, decide one now, even provisionally, because the tiers depend on it. The brand-level view of Amazon Business is about exactly this discipline of keeping the channels coherent.
Which buyers the tiers are for
Tiers are for end users who buy in multiples: an office buying 25 of your desk organisers, a clinic buying 40 bottles of your hand cream, a school buying 60 of your pencil cases. These buyers are price-aware but not price-obsessed. A visible tier reassures them that ordering more is rewarded and gives the person placing the order something to show whoever approves it.
They are not for resellers. A buyer who wants 500 units for resale should not be finding that price in a table on a listing. If they want it, they should ask for it, and on Amazon Business that means the request-for-quote feature, where you can see the quantity, consider the buyer, and quote a price that fits. Keeping the public tiers modest and handling large quantities by quote is the cleanest split.
The tiers are also not for a buyer who wants to place a purchase order with net-30 terms and a case pack. That buyer is a wholesale account, and the right answer is a line sheet and a wholesale price, not a deeper tier.
Setting up the tiers in practice
Start with three tiers, not five. Three is enough to show a shape and easy to reason about. A common structure is a first tier at a quantity a small office would order, a second at what a larger site would order, and a third at the most a genuine end user plausibly needs. For a consumable, that might be 6, 24 and 72. For a durable, 5, 15 and 40.
Make each step meaningful in dollars. A tier that saves the buyer twenty cents a unit is noise. A tier that saves them a dollar or two per unit on a $22 item is a reason to round the order up.
Set the tiers on your best-selling business ASINs first, and leave slow movers alone until you see how the tiers change ordering behaviour. The B2B reports in Seller Central show the quantities business customers actually order; the seller-side view of Amazon Business explains where to find them. If most business orders are for 3 or 4 units, a first tier at 10 is invisible, and one at 5 might lift the average order.
Revisit the tiers every time your FBA fees or your landed cost change. Amazon adjusts fulfilment fees periodically and a tier that worked at last year's fee can be under water this year.
Quantity discounts versus wholesale pricing
It helps to see the two side by side, because they look like the same thing and are not.
A quantity discount is a marketplace price. The buyer pays Amazon, Amazon pays you after fees, FBA ships each unit, and the buyer is an end user. The discount is a marketing tool that trades margin for order size and loyalty on a channel that already exists.
A wholesale price is a channel price. The buyer sends a purchase order, you ship cases from your own inventory or your 3PL, you invoice with net terms, and the buyer sells the product on or stocks it at scale. The price is much lower, but nothing is deducted from it: no referral fee, no FBA fee, no advertising. On a $10.50 wholesale unit with a $6.00 landed cost and a share of freight, you keep about $4.00, which is close to what you keep on the 50-unit Amazon tier, and the wholesale order may be a pallet.
The first is worth doing and takes an afternoon. The second is where a brand grows past the listing, and it needs a list of buyers to approach. If you want to see who would stock your product, paste its link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview. Then set your Amazon Business tiers so that none of them make those buyers' lives harder.
A well-built tier table is a quiet asset. It nudges business orders up, costs nothing to run, and leaves the wholesale price intact. Build it from the fees up, cap it above the wholesale price, and let quotes handle everything larger.