Amazon Business (B2B on Amazon)
Pay by Invoice is Amazon Business's own net-terms program: an approved business customer buys your product, receives an invoice from Amazon, and pays Amazon later, usually within 30 days. You still get paid by Amazon, not by the customer, and Amazon carries the credit risk. What changes for you is timing: by default your disbursement for that order waits until the customer's invoice is settled or due, unless you opt to be paid on the normal cycle for a fee.
That is the whole mechanism. The rest of this article is about what it does to your cash flow, how to spot these orders in Seller Central, and why Pay by Invoice is a useful preview of what selling to a distributor on real net terms feels like.
What Pay by Invoice actually is
On the buyer side, Pay by Invoice is a credit line Amazon extends to qualifying Amazon Business accounts. The buyer checks out without a card, Amazon issues the invoice, and the buyer's accounts-payable team pays it on the due date. Larger accounts can be granted longer terms. The buyer sees you as the seller of record on the order, but their financial relationship is with Amazon.
On the seller side, Professional sellers on Amazon Business are enrolled by default. There is nothing to switch on in your listings, no separate offer to create, and no credit check you run. The order arrives in Manage Orders like any other, ships like any other (FBA or FBM), and counts toward your metrics like any other. The only differences are the payment method shown on the order and when the money lands in your account.
Amazon does the collection. If the customer pays late, Amazon chases them. If the customer never pays, Amazon still pays you. For a seller used to Amazon deducting refunds and chargebacks from the balance, this is the reverse: the marketplace is absorbing risk on your behalf rather than pushing it to you.
What it does to your disbursements
This is the part most sellers miss until they read a Payments report and see a balance that is larger than expected but not yet available.
A standard order settles into your account balance at the normal cadence, and you receive it at your next disbursement. A Pay by Invoice order sits in a deferred state until the invoice is paid or its due date passes. Only then does the amount move into the balance you can withdraw. Amazon offers a way to have those orders paid on the standard schedule instead, in exchange for a fee taken from the order amount. You choose the default once in your account settings, and it applies to all Pay by Invoice orders going forward.
Work a real example. Say a business customer buys 40 units of your $24 stainless water bottle. Your business price is $21.50, so the order is $860. After the referral fee and FBA fees, roughly $580 is headed to you. On a card order, that $580 would be in your next disbursement, perhaps ten days out. On a Pay by Invoice order with 30-day terms and the default setting, it can be forty days before that $580 is yours to spend. If you have $6,000 of inventory to reorder that month, you feel the gap.
Take the faster-payment option and you give up a slice of the $860 to close that gap. Whether that is worth it depends on what the money is doing otherwise. A brand with a healthy cash cushion should leave the default alone and treat the delay as a cost of serving larger buyers. A brand financing every purchase order from last month's disbursement should take the fee and keep the cycle short.
How to spot these orders in Seller Central
Open any order in Manage Orders and the payment method is shown on the order details. Pay by Invoice orders carry that label, and the invoice due date is visible on the order. In your Payments dashboard, Transaction View, the amount shows as pending rather than available until the invoice is settled.
If you want to see how much of your revenue is running on terms, the B2B reporting inside Seller Central breaks business orders out from consumer orders, and you can filter by payment method in the orders report. It is worth doing once a quarter. A brand whose business orders are mostly Pay by Invoice is being bought by procurement teams, not owner-operators putting a company card down, and that tells you something about who your buyers are. The article on what Amazon Business looks like from the seller side goes through the rest of that data.
Who is buying this way, and why it matters
The customers who use Pay by Invoice are the ones with an accounts-payable process: schools, clinics, facilities teams, restaurants with a bookkeeper, small manufacturers, government-adjacent buyers. They buy on invoice because that is how they buy everything else. A card is the exception in their world, not the rule.
That matters because the same buyers are the ones a distributor serves. When a dental practice orders 24 of your organizers on Amazon Business with net-30 terms, that practice would just as happily buy from a dental supply distributor who already invoices them monthly. Amazon Business has proven the product fits in that buyer's routine. What it has not proven is that the buyer will keep coming back to a listing rather than adding your item to their existing supplier's order sheet.
Watching which categories of buyer choose invoice terms is one of the cheapest pieces of market research you can do. The invoices those buyers receive also say a lot about what they need from a supplier: a purchase order number, a legal entity name, a tax treatment.
Does Pay by Invoice replace real net terms?
No, and the difference is worth being precise about, because the vocabulary is the same and the mechanics are not.
With Pay by Invoice, Amazon is the creditor. Amazon decides who qualifies, sets the limit, sets the terms, and collects. You do not know the buyer's credit history, you cannot extend them a bigger limit because you trust them, and you cannot offer them 2/10 net 30 to encourage early payment. You are a supplier to Amazon's credit program, not a lender.
When you sell to a distributor or a chain, you are the creditor. You run a credit application, you decide whether to open the account at net 30, you send the invoice with your remit-to details, and you wait for a check or an ACH. If the account pays at day 45, that is your problem to chase. If it never pays, that is your loss unless you carry credit insurance or factor the receivable.
So the two are parallel systems. Pay by Invoice is a safe way to serve business buyers on terms without taking on the work or the risk of being a lender. Real net terms are how the wholesale channel works, and you cannot avoid them once a buyer wants to place a purchase order directly. The good news is that having watched Pay by Invoice orders for a year, you will already understand the rhythm: the buyer's due date, the deferred balance, the temptation to pay for faster cash.
Using the delay to practice for wholesale
If you plan to sell to stores and distributors eventually, treat Pay by Invoice as a rehearsal.
Track your deferred balance as a separate line in your monthly cash-flow sheet. That line is your receivables, and it will grow once you open wholesale accounts. Decide now what fraction of your revenue you are comfortable having on terms at any time. A brand that keeps its Pay by Invoice exposure to a couple of weeks of FBA fees and reorders is usually fine. A brand that has a full month of revenue sitting in deferred payments has a working-capital problem waiting to happen, and a distributor will make it larger.
Price your business offers with the delay in mind. If you set a business price and a tiered quantity discount, remember that the biggest orders are the most likely to be placed on invoice. A tier that is thin on margin and slow to pay is the worst of both.
And when a buyer's invoice-driven orders get large and regular, that is the signal to look at the wholesale side of your business. An account buying 200 units a month on Amazon Business with terms is, in every way but the paperwork, a wholesale account paying retail-adjacent prices. Some of those buyers will happily move to a direct purchase order if you ask, and some are better reached through the distributor who already serves them. The request-for-quote feature is often where those conversations start on Amazon, and the overview of Amazon Business as a B2B marketplace explains where the marketplace stops and direct wholesale begins.
A short checklist for the seller
Before you change anything, look at three numbers: how much of last quarter's revenue came from Pay by Invoice orders, how long on average those funds sat deferred, and what your inventory reorder cadence is. If the deferred amount is small relative to your reorders, leave the default and enjoy the larger orders. If it is large, either take the faster-payment option or raise your business price a little to cover the cost of waiting.
Then look at who is buying. If the buyers on terms are a recognisable type of organisation, that type is a market, and there are distributors who already invoice it every month. If you want to see who those distributors and stores would be for your specific listing, paste the product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview. It is a faster way to see the shape of the channel than guessing from a payments report.
Pay by Invoice is not a wholesale program and Amazon does not present it as one. It is a payment method that happens to expose you to the kind of buyer who lives on invoices. Learn from the delay, price for it, and let it point you toward the buyers who will place a purchase order with you directly.