Amazon Business (B2B on Amazon)
To sell on Amazon Business you need a Professional seller account, the Amazon Business seller features enabled in Seller Central, and then a few deliberate settings on your listings: a business price, quantity discount tiers, a completed business profile, and the tax and payment programs left switched on. There is no separate marketplace to apply to and no new listings to create; your existing ASINs become visible to business customers with extra pricing fields attached. The whole setup takes an afternoon, and the decisions about pricing take longer than the clicks.
This guide goes through the steps in the order a brand should do them, with the arithmetic behind each pricing choice, and ends with what to watch in the first ninety days. It assumes you already sell on Amazon and know Manage Inventory and the Payments dashboard. If you want the big picture first, the overview of Amazon Business as a B2B marketplace explains what the program is and where it stops.
Step 1: confirm eligibility and enable the seller features
Amazon Business is open to sellers on the Professional plan. Individual accounts cannot serve business customers with business pricing. If you are on Professional, look in Seller Central under your account settings for the Amazon Business seller program; on most accounts it is already active, and the Business Price column in Manage Inventory is the giveaway. If the column is missing, enable the program from the account settings page and it appears.
Enabling costs nothing extra. The referral fees for business orders follow the same schedule as consumer orders in most categories, and FBA fees are unchanged. You are adding a buyer audience, not a fee tier.
Once enabled, a B2B area appears in Seller Central with its own dashboard, quote management and reporting. Bookmark it; it is where the rest of this guide lives.
Step 2: complete the business profile
Business customers can view a seller's profile and filter search results on its contents, so fill it in properly before you touch pricing. The profile carries your legal business name, address, a description, and any credentials you hold. Credentials include ownership certifications (small, woman-owned, minority-owned, veteran-owned and similar) and quality or compliance certifications relevant to your category. They show as badges to buyers, and institutional buyers with supplier diversity targets filter on them. The article on Amazon Business certifications covers which ones matter and how to get them recognised.
Check the legal name and address against what you want printed on the invoices Amazon generates for business orders. A buyer's accounts-payable department sees exactly what is in this profile.
Step 3: set business prices
The business price is a separate price for business customers, set per ASIN. Consumers never see it. You set it in the Business Price column of Manage Inventory for one ASIN at a time, or in bulk with a pricing file that includes the business price fields.
The question is how far below the consumer price to go. Start from the unit economics. Take a $24 desk organiser: the referral fee is about $3.60, FBA fulfilment is about $5.00, landed cost is $6.50, and you spend about $2.50 a unit on advertising to win consumer sales. That leaves $6.40 a unit on an advertised consumer sale. A business customer who found you through Amazon Business search did not cost you the $2.50 in ads, so a business price of $22.00 gives up $2.00 of price and saves $2.50 of advertising, and it nets you about the same while making the listing more attractive to the buyer comparing you with a competitor.
A business price a dollar or two under the consumer price is normal. A business price at the consumer price is fine for items with thin margin. A business price far below is a mistake unless you have decided that business volume is worth more than margin on that ASIN, and even then it has to stay well above the wholesale price you will quote distributors and stores, because those buyers can see it too.
Step 4: add quantity discount tiers
With a business price in place, add tiers for larger quantities on the same editor. Each tier is a minimum quantity and a unit price for orders at or above it. Three tiers is a good start; more adds complexity without adding orders.
The tiers should be set from your fees up, not as round percentages off, and the lowest tier must sit above your wholesale price with room to spare. The full method for setting quantity discounts works the example in detail. For the $24 organiser with a $22.00 business price, tiers of $21.00 at 10 units, $20.00 at 25 and $19.00 at 50 are plausible, and a wholesale price of around $10.50 stays far enough below that a store still has a reason to buy from you directly.
If you use a repricer on the consumer offer, check that it does not touch the business price or the tiers, and that it never drops the consumer price under the business price, which makes the business price meaningless.
Step 5: decide on business-only offers
Some products only make sense to business buyers: a 24-pack of your consumable, a professional-grade version, a case quantity. You can list those as business-only offers that consumers cannot purchase. This is useful for bulk packs you do not want cluttering the consumer listing, and for products where the retail-size listing should stay clean.
The trade-off is that business-only ASINs get no consumer reviews and no consumer sales velocity, so they can be slow to rank inside Amazon Business search. A common approach is to keep the single-unit consumer listing with business pricing and tiers, and add one business-only bulk pack only for the ASINs where business demand is already visible in your orders.
Step 6: leave tax exemption and invoice payment on
Two programs are enabled by default for Professional sellers and should stay that way.
The Amazon Tax Exemption Program lets exempt organisations (schools, non-profits, resellers, government) buy without sales tax. Amazon validates and stores the buyer's certificate; you do nothing, and it makes your listing purchasable by a buyer who otherwise could not check out. There is no reason to opt out.
Pay by Invoice lets qualifying business customers pay on terms extended by Amazon. Amazon pays you and carries the credit risk, but by default your disbursement for those orders is deferred until the invoice is settled. You can choose in your account settings to be paid on the standard schedule for a fee. Read how Pay by Invoice affects your cash flow before deciding; most brands with a cushion leave the default, and brands financing reorders from each disbursement take the faster payment.
Step 7: set up to answer quotes
Business customers who want a large quantity can request a quote on your listing. Requests land in the quote management area of the B2B dashboard, with a window to respond. A quote is a one-off price for a stated quantity, and it is where most large business orders happen, because a buyer wanting hundreds of units rarely takes the public tier.
Prepare before the first request arrives: know your floor price per unit for large quantities, know your available inventory, and have a rule for what you will not quote below (your wholesale price plus fees is the usual floor). The guide to Amazon Business quotes covers how to price one so it wins without giving away the channel.
Step 8: learn the reports
The B2B area has reporting on business orders, buyers by organisation type, top ASINs among business customers and a comparison with consumer sales. Look at it monthly. The organisation types that buy you are the most useful thing on Amazon Business, because each type has a distributor already selling to it. The seller-side view of Amazon Business explains what each report shows and what it withholds.
The first ninety days
For the first month, change nothing after setup and watch. See which ASINs pick up business orders, which quantities buyers actually choose, and whether the tiers are reached. If most business orders are for 3 or 4 units and your first tier is at 10, lower the first tier to 5 and see if the average order rises.
In the second month, add a business-only bulk pack for the one or two ASINs where business demand is clear. Answer every quote inside the window even when the answer is a price the buyer will not like; unanswered quotes count against you.
By the third month you should know three things: which organisation types buy you, how much of your business revenue arrives on invoice terms, and whether your tiers are holding above your wholesale price. That last point matters because business buyers are the beginning of a wholesale map, not its end. The distributors and stores who already serve the organisations buying you on Amazon Business are the wholesale channel, and they need a wholesale price your Amazon tiers do not undercut. If you want to see who those distributors and stores would be for a specific listing, paste its link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview.
Selling on Amazon Business is a modest amount of setup for a steady, lower-cost stream of orders from buyers who reorder. Do the steps in this order, price from the fees up, keep the tiers above wholesale, and treat the reports as research.