Amazon Business (B2B on Amazon)
Quantity discounts on Amazon are up to five price tiers you attach to an ASIN's business price, each one a lower unit price that kicks in once a business buyer's cart reaches a set quantity. You set them in the same Business Price panel in Manage Inventory or in the price feed, as either a percentage off the business price or a fixed price per tier, and only Amazon Business accounts see them.
The setting takes two minutes. Designing tiers that earn you order size without giving away the margin you need to fund inventory is the real work, and it is arithmetic, not guesswork.
The mechanics first
Every quantity discount hangs off a business price, so you need one before the tier table unlocks. If you have not set that yet, setting business prices covers where the field is and how to pick the flat number.
Under the business price you add tiers. Each tier is a minimum quantity and a price. You choose one of two types for the whole ASIN: a percentage off, where each tier is a discount from the business price, or a fixed price, where each tier is a literal unit price. Fixed prices are easier to reason about because the number you type is the number the buyer pays per unit, and it does not drift when you change the business price above it.
Tiers apply to the quantity of that ASIN in a single order. A buyer who orders 12 units gets the 12-unit price on all 12, not on the units above the threshold. Two orders of 6 do not combine. The discount shows on the detail page as a small table under the business price, which is one of the things that makes a business buyer stop and notice the listing.
Amazon still calculates the referral fee on the price actually paid, and the FBA fee is per unit regardless of the tier. Multi-unit orders of the same ASIN do get a lower FBA fee per unit in some size bands because they ship in one box, but do not build your tiers on that assumption without checking the fee preview for your product.
Start from the floor, not from the discount
The mistake is to think in discount steps, such as a little off at 5, more at 10, more at 25. That is the buyer's view. Your view is the unit contribution at each tier, and you build the tiers so that every one of them still clears the floor you need.
Take a plausible product: a pack of 50 compostable coffee filters, consumer price $16.00, business price $15.00. Landed cost per pack is $3.40. The referral fee on a $15.00 sale is $2.25. The FBA fee for a light, flat pack is $3.70. Averaged ad spend per unit is $1.20 on consumer orders; call it $0.60 on business orders, since most of those come from reorders. Per-unit contribution at the flat business price is $15.00 minus $3.40 minus $2.25 minus $3.70 minus $0.60, which is $5.05.
Now decide your floor. Suppose you need $3.50 per unit to cover overhead and fund the next production run. That is the number no tier may go under.
A worked tier table
Set three tiers with fixed prices, and check each one.
Tier one at 6 units, $14.25. Referral fee becomes $2.14. Contribution is $14.25 minus $3.40 minus $2.14 minus $3.70 minus $0.60, which is $4.41. Comfortably above the floor.
Tier two at 12 units, $13.50. Referral fee becomes $2.03. Contribution is $13.50 minus $3.40 minus $2.03 minus $3.70 minus $0.60, which is $3.77. Still above $3.50, but there is less room now.
Tier three at 24 units, $12.90. Referral fee becomes $1.94. Contribution is $12.90 minus $3.40 minus $1.94 minus $3.70 minus $0.60, which is $3.26. That is below the floor. Either raise the tier three price to about $13.15, where contribution comes back to $3.50, or accept that at 24 units the FBA fee per unit really does drop because Amazon ships them together, and confirm the actual fee in the preview before you keep $12.90.
Notice what the arithmetic shows. The FBA fee is the largest fixed drag, and it does not shrink with the discount. The referral fee shrinks with the price, so it softens each step a little. Your landed cost is constant. So the deeper you go, the faster contribution falls, and the third tier eats most of the margin the first two preserved. A tier table that looks generous to a buyer is often one where the top tier is underwater and the seller has not noticed.
How many tiers, and where the thresholds go
Three tiers is usually right. Five is the maximum and almost never necessary; the fourth and fifth tiers tend to sit at quantities your business buyers do not reach, so they exist only to make the table look long.
Thresholds should follow how the product is actually used, not round numbers. An office buying coffee filters for a break room goes through a pack a week, so 6 and 12 map to six weeks and a quarter. A clinic buying nitrile gloves thinks in cases. A contractor buying cable ties thinks in the number of jobs on the board. Pull your business orders from the order report, look at the quantity distribution, and put your first threshold just above the most common quantity. The point of a tier is to pull a buyer who was going to order 4 up to 6, not to reward the buyer who was going to order 6 anyway.
The top tier should sit at the largest quantity you are happy to fulfil through FBA from a single order. Above that, you are better served by a different kind of buyer, and that is the topic of the next section.
Where quantity discounts stop and wholesale starts
Business buyers on Amazon are buying to use. The office that takes 12 packs of filters is stocking a kitchen. A tier table serves that buyer well. It does not serve a distributor who wants 40 cases to sell into cafes, or a grocery chain that wants a pallet with a case pack of 12 and a barcode on the outer box. Those buyers do not shop on Amazon Business for inventory, whatever tier you set, because their economics need a price around $7 or $8 per pack, and no tier that clears your FBA floor can get there.
That is not a failure of the tier table. It is the boundary between two channels. On Amazon you pay a referral fee and an FBA fee and get a buyer who pays retail-adjacent prices in small quantities. In wholesale you skip both fees, ship a case or a pallet, and accept a much lower unit price because the retailer does the selling. The per-order economics of each are laid out in Amazon B2B versus wholesale direct, and it is worth reading before you push a tier below the floor trying to attract a buyer the channel cannot hold.
What quantity discounts do give you is evidence. If tier two and tier three get used every month by the same buyers, you have a product with a repeat use case at quantity. That is exactly what a distributor wants to hear, and the Amazon order history is a cleaner proof than any pitch deck. When you want to see which distributors and stores serve the buyers you are already seeing, paste the ASIN into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of who would carry it.
Mistakes that show up in the fee report
A few patterns recur among sellers who set tiers early and check them late.
The consumer price drops under the business price after a repricing pass, and the tier table becomes a set of discounts from a number nobody sees. Check the relationship between consumer price, business price and tiers at least monthly, and after every promotion.
A percentage-off tier type is chosen, then the business price is cut for a season, and every tier moves down with it, including the top tier that was already close to the floor. Fixed prices do not have this problem.
A low-priced product hits the per-item referral fee minimum at the top tier, so the discount stops reducing the referral fee and comes entirely out of contribution. This one is invisible unless you look at the fee preview at the tier price, not the business price. The full list of fee mechanics is in Amazon Business fees for sellers.
Tiers are set on a parent's child ASINs inconsistently, so a buyer choosing between two sizes sees a table on one and nothing on the other. Set them by family.
A short routine that keeps tiers honest
Once a quarter, export your business orders, group by ASIN and quantity, and look at three things: which tiers are being reached, whether the buyers reaching them are repeating, and what the contribution at each reached tier was after the fees Amazon actually charged. Raise the tiers nobody reaches, hold the ones that are pulling orders up, and fix any tier where the real contribution came in under your floor. Then take the ASINs with steady tier-two and tier-three reorders and put them at the top of the list you take to distributors, because those are the products with demand at quantity already proven.