Amazon Business repricing: how to manage your B2B prices

What Amazon Business means for sellers

Amazon Business is the part of Amazon dedicated to purchases by companies, professionals and organisations. For you it isn't a separate store: business customers buy the same products, from the same product pages.

What changes is what they can see. You can offer them a reserved price, quantity discounts and VAT-exclusive prices. Everyone else keeps seeing your regular price.

Why bother? According to Amazon, business customers in Europe order on average 75% more units per order than consumers and make 30% fewer returns. These are Amazon's figures, not a guarantee: they depend on what you sell. But if your products are also useful to an office, a shop or a workshop, it's worth a look.

What you need to get started

Less than you might think. You don't need a second account or separate stock.

• A seller account on the Professional plan: that's the plan that unlocks B2B features
• No separate Amazon Business account: you use the one you already have
• The same inventory as your consumer sales, with FBA, merchant fulfilment or both
• No additional charge, according to Amazon, for business prices and quantity discounts on the Professional plan

The business price: what it is and how to set it

The business price is a unit price reserved for registered Amazon Business customers, whatever the quantity. Amazon presents it as a price lower than retail.

Here's an example. You sell a toner pack to consumers at €30. You set a business price of €27. A registered company sees €27, a consumer still sees €30.

You set it product by product from inventory management in Seller Central. With many products you can upload a bulk file. Amazon's pages say a change can take up to 15 minutes to become visible to business customers.

There's also the business-only offer: a product sold only to business customers, with no consumer price. It can be useful for items that only make sense in large packs.

Quantity discounts: how to build your tiers

Quantity discounts reward buyers who purchase more. They start from the business price, so you need to set that first. Amazon's pages mention up to five tiers, each with a lower unit price than the one before. A discount can be a percentage or a fixed price.

Back to the €27 toner, with three percentage tiers:

• From 5 units, 3% off: €26.19 each
• From 10 units, 6% off: €25.38 each
• From 20 units, 10% off: €24.30 each

Two things to watch with tiers

The first is margin. The last tier is the lowest price you're really selling at, so that's where the numbers must work, not on the business price. In the example, if cost, fees and shipping add up to €25 per toner, at €24.30 you lose money on every unit.

The second is the discount type. A percentage tier follows the business price when it changes. A fixed-price tier doesn't. If you fix €25 from ten units and the business price drops to €24.50, whoever buys ten units pays more than whoever buys one. If your business prices move often, percentages are the safer choice.

There's another reason not to stop at the single-unit price. Amazon says that in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, multi-unit business orders with a business discount of at least 3% can get reduced FBA fees and referral fees. Conditions change, so check them in Seller Central before you count on them.

VAT and invoices: what companies expect

A company thinks in prices without VAT and needs an invoice. Amazon offers a free VAT Calculation Service: it calculates the tax on your listing price, shows business customers VAT-exclusive prices and generates invoices on your behalf.

If you prefer, you can upload your own invoices and Amazon delivers them to the customer. Before enabling the service, ask your accountant how it fits with your current invoicing.

B2B competition has its own rules

This is the point many sellers miss. The same product has two offers, consumer and business, and each has its own competitors and its own Buy Box. Amazon calls it the Featured Offer, and says business prices and quantity discounts help you win it.

Competitors' business prices move independently. The seller beating you with consumers may not be there at all for companies, and vice versa.

An example. You hold the consumer Buy Box at €30 and have a €27 business price you set six months ago. Meanwhile a competitor has moved to €26.50 for companies only. You see the consumer Buy Box and think all is well, but business orders are going to them.

The reverse also happens: if you're far below other business prices, you're giving away margin on orders you'd have won anyway.

How to win the Buy Box

Amazon B2B repricing: three ways to manage business prices

Amazon Business repricing means updating your business prices based on competitors' business offers. You have three options.

• By hand: fine with a few products and stable competition. The limit is that business offers aren't what you see when you check the page as a consumer: to really follow them you need a business view
• With Amazon's own automated pricing: there are dedicated rules, for example a business price that stays a set percentage below the standard price. Amazon's pages also describe a competitive rule on the business Featured Offer: check which ones you have in your store
• With an Amazon Business repricer: it reads competitors' business offers and updates your business price continuously, within the minimum and maximum you set. It makes most sense with many products, or when you want something different from a fixed rule

Amazon Automate Pricing or an external repricerWhat an Amazon repricer is and how it works

Common B2B pricing mistakes

• Setting a business price once and never looking at it again
• Giving every product the same discount, without looking at each one's business competitors
• Calculating your minimum on the business price and forgetting the last discount tier
• Using fixed-price tiers on products whose prices change often
• Judging your business performance from the consumer price: they're two different races
• Setting tiers nobody can reach: pick quantities your customers really buy

How Mossap helps

Mossap handles business prices as a separate channel from consumer ones. It works on European marketplaces only: the Amazon Business channel is available on Amazon Italy, Germany, France, Spain and the United Kingdom, not on Amazon.com in the US. Here's what it does.

• You activate the channel per country from the Channels page; repricing stays off until you choose a strategy
• It reads competitors' business offers from the notifications Amazon dedicates to this channel
• It updates only the business price, within the minimum and maximum you set: the consumer price stays out of it
• Minimum and maximum can be calculated from the consumer price of the same product, for example 5% below
• It never changes quantity discounts, and flags fixed-amount tiers with an asterisk
• It reprices products that already have a business price on Amazon
• There's no extra cost: business listings count towards your plan like consumer ones, and on activation all active products of the country are counted
• It connects through the official authorization from Seller Central, with a 14-day free trial with no credit card and plans from € 49.00 per month + VAT with an annual subscription

Amazon Business repricingPlan pricing

Where to start

1. 1

   Pick a few products

   Start with those a company would buy repeatedly or in quantity, such as consumables and office or workshop supplies.

2. 2

   Do the maths on the last tier

   Set your business price and discounts from your real cost, fees included, so you know right away how low you can go.

3. 3

   Check other business prices

   Look at competitors' business offers, not their consumer ones, and decide how you want to position yourself.

4. 4

   Measure and adjust

   After a few weeks, see which tiers are really used and change the ones nobody picks.