Amazon Business (B2B on Amazon)
A request for quote on Amazon Business is a business customer asking you for a special price on a large quantity of one ASIN, above what your public quantity discounts cover. The request lands in the quote management area of your B2B dashboard in Seller Central, you have a limited window to respond with a unit price for that quantity, and the buyer then has a window to accept and place the order at your quoted price. Winning one comes down to responding fast, pricing from your fees up rather than from a percentage off, and knowing the floor below which the order is not worth having.
Quotes are where the biggest single orders on Amazon Business happen. They are also the feature most sellers ignore, because the request arrives as a notification, the window is short, and the seller has no idea what number to put in the box. This article fixes the last part.
How the request-for-quote flow works
On the buyer side, a business customer looking at your listing who wants more units than your discount table covers can ask for a quote, stating the quantity they need. Amazon forwards the request to you. The buyer sees nothing until you respond.
On your side, the request appears in Seller Central under quote management, with the ASIN, the requested quantity and the deadline for your reply. You enter a unit price for that quantity, or decline. If you quote, the buyer is notified and can accept within their own window, at which point a normal Amazon Business order is created at the quoted price and fulfilled the way the ASIN is normally fulfilled, through FBA or by you. Fees are charged on the quoted price as on any order.
That is all. There is no negotiation thread, no counter-offer, no way to ask the buyer what they intend to do with the units. You get a quantity and a deadline; you give a price. If you miss the deadline, the request expires and it counts against your responsiveness.
Price the quote from the fees up
The reflex is to take the lowest public tier and shave a bit more. Resist it, and instead build the number from the unit economics, because on a large order small errors multiply.
Take a $24 desk lamp with a business price of $22.00 and a lowest tier of $19.00 at 50 units. A buyer requests 300. Landed cost is $7.00. FBA fulfilment for an item that size is about $6.00 a unit and it is charged on every unit, because Amazon still ships 300 individual parcels or, at best, a multi-unit shipment from the same pool. The referral fee is a share of your quoted price.
At $17.00 a unit, the referral fee is about $2.55, FBA is $6.00, landed cost is $7.00, and you keep $1.45 a unit, or $435 on the order. At $18.00, you keep about $2.30 a unit, or $690. At $16.00 you keep about $0.60 a unit, and one damaged return wipes out a chunk of it. So the sensible quote for 300 lamps is somewhere in the $17.50 to $18.50 range, and the honest floor is around $17.00.
The mistake is to quote $14.00 because 300 feels like a lot. It is a lot of units. It is not a lot of profit, because the fees do not fall with quantity. A quote that nets you less than a normal business order per unit is a quote that only makes sense if you need the cash or the inventory gone.
Check inventory before quoting. A 300-unit quote accepted against 180 units in FBA becomes a partial order and an unhappy buyer.
What the floor should be
Your floor for any quote is the higher of two numbers.
The first is the unit price at which the order still pays you at least what a normal business order pays per unit, after referral and FBA fees. Below that, you are buying volume with margin, and there is no loyalty attached; the buyer will request another quote next time and expect the same.
The second is your wholesale price to a store, plus the fees Amazon charges. If you sell that lamp to stores at $11.00 in cases of 6, a store's landed cost is perhaps $12.00. The Amazon fees on a $17.00 sale are about $8.55, so a $17.00 quote nets you $8.45 before landed cost, which is less than the $11.00 a store pays you. In other words, a quote at $17.00 already earns you less per unit than wholesale does; going lower is worse than selling the same units to a distributor, with the added harm that a reseller could be the one requesting the quote. The brand-level strategy for Amazon Business explains why keeping quotes above the wholesale line protects the channel.
If the requested quantity is so large that no quote above your floor makes sense on the marketplace, the answer is not a lower quote. It is a decline, with the knowledge that a buyer of that size belongs in your wholesale channel, if you had one.
Respond even when the answer is no
Unanswered quote requests expire and reflect on your responsiveness inside Amazon Business. Answering with a price the buyer may not accept is better than not answering. A quote at your floor that is declined costs you nothing; a request that times out costs you standing.
The response window is short enough that you need a rule before the first request arrives. Write down, per ASIN you expect to be quoted on, the floor price and the quantity at which you would rather decline. Keep it in the same sheet as your business prices and quantity tiers, so all three are set against the same fee assumptions. When a request comes in, the answer is a lookup, not a debate.
What a quote is not
A quote is a one-time marketplace price. The buyer pays Amazon, possibly on invoice terms extended by Amazon, FBA ships each unit, and the transaction ends. There is no agreement to reorder, no contract price, no exclusivity, no promotional support, and no relationship you can continue outside Amazon.
A wholesale order is a channel relationship. The buyer sends a purchase order, you ship cases, you invoice with net-30 terms, and the price on the line sheet holds for a season. The units move without referral fees or FBA fees, and the buyer is a store or a distributor with a name and an email address.
They look alike because both involve a big quantity and a special price. They are different because one is a transaction Amazon owns and the other is a customer you own. A brand that keeps winning 300-unit quotes from the same organisation type has learned something valuable: buyers of that type want the product in volume. The next step is to find the distributor who already supplies that type and quote them wholesale, where the margin structure actually works at scale.
Using quote requests as market research
Even the quotes you decline are information. A request for 500 units of a particular ASIN from a healthcare buyer tells you the product has an institutional use case, at a quantity that a medical supply distributor would consider normal. A run of requests in the same month from education buyers tells you a budget cycle is turning and a school supply distributor has a catalogue deadline coming.
Log every request: ASIN, quantity, organisation type if visible, your quote, and the outcome. After a couple of quarters the log shows which products have bulk demand and from whom. Combined with the organisation breakdown in your B2B reports, which the seller-side view of Amazon Business explains, it is the most direct evidence you will get of where a wholesale channel would start.
If you want to see which distributors and stores would carry that product, paste the listing into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of who would stock it. Then the next large quote request has a second possible answer: a wholesale price, on a purchase order, to a buyer who is yours.
Requests for quote are short, blunt and easy to fumble. Treat them as arithmetic with a floor, answer every one inside the window, and read the pattern they leave behind. The pattern is a wholesale map drawn by your own buyers.