Amazon Business has quietly become one of the largest B2B distributors in the world. It has passed $60 billion in annualised gross sales, serving more than 11 million organisations, including 97 of the Fortune 100 (Modern Distribution Management); some in the industry, including the guest below, put the true run rate higher still and expect it to approach $100 billion. Yet most mid-market manufacturers have never worked out what their Amazon B2B strategy should be, or whether they need one.
On an episode of MerchantSpring Marketplace Masters, Brian Beck, author of Billion Dollar B2B Ecommerce and managing partner at Enceiba, an agency focused exclusively on B2B, made the case that this is now a board-level question.
The shift starts with the buyer. Roughly three-quarters of the global workforce is now millennial or younger, and those people are moving into procurement roles well into their forties. They grew up as digital and Amazon natives, and they bring consumer expectations to B2B purchasing: they want to research and buy through e-commerce, and Amazon has become a primary place to do it. Beck's estimate is that around 70% of product search now starts on Amazon, and that is true for businesses, not just consumers.
Amazon has leaned into that, investing heavily to remove the friction of traditional B2B channels while the B2B industry as a whole has been slow to digitise. The punchline is simple: you have to show up where the buyers already expect you. When they don't find you, they don't stop buying; they buy something else.
Every year Enceiba's Amazon B2B Pulse survey asks manufacturers why they don't sell on Amazon, and the number one answer is always the same: fear of channel conflict, the worry that selling on Amazon will disintermediate distributors, retailers or an internal sales force.
The second is a belief that “my products aren't right for Amazon.” Beck calls that legacy thinking. HVAC systems, giant industrial fans, pallets of building materials, big commercial lawnmowers, products that ship by truck, now sell in real volume. What makes the data stranger is that over a third of the same manufacturers admit there is significant revenue opportunity there, and still choose not to sell.
Beck's reframe is that the incrementality debate misses the point. If you are not on the shelf, the sale doesn't vanish; it goes to someone else, and increasingly that someone is an unfamiliar brand out of Asia. By his figures, around half of Amazon's largest third-party sellers are now China-based. So the question is existential, not incremental.
His favourite way to make a CEO feel it is to search their category live on Amazon, a pneumatic impact hammer, say, and point to a brand they have never heard of doing five million dollars a year, with product that isn't low quality and is sometimes made in the very same factory as theirs.
Studies Enceiba has run with clients tend to show most of the Amazon revenue is genuinely incremental anyway, recapturing aftermarket volume or lost share. The honest framing for the board is: do you want a slice of that, or do you want to keep handing it to a competitor?
Amazon Business launched in 2015, after Amazon's first B2B attempt, Amazon Supply, failed in 2012. The lesson Amazon took was that B2B buyers didn't want a separate destination; they wanted the Amazon experience they already knew. So Amazon Business is not a different website.
It is a feature layer on top of the same Amazon, adding what a business buyer needs: bulk purchasing, technical product attributes that matter for fasteners, electrical, HVAC or plumbing applications, request-for-quote workflows, and industry-vertical navigation (Amazon Business).
It is also pushing into managed spend, the planned, budgeted buying of large organisations, governments and universities, bidding on and winning RFPs and integrating with procurement systems. List your products there and you can appear inside those procurement systems without building the integrations yourself.
The scale signals why it converts. Amazon reports serving the vast majority of the Fortune 100, and Beck cites conversion rates roughly three times higher than the consumer side, which makes intuitive sense: a business buyer has a job to do and a specification to meet, not a discretionary whim to indulge.
Amazon Business works under either model, so the real question is which account type fits. If Amazon considers you a strategic brand, large enough that it wants to manage the relationship directly, you may be steered to 1P and sell to Amazon wholesale. But most mid-market manufacturers get a choice, and Beck finds 3P is frequently the better path.
Selling as a marketplace seller (Amazon never owns the inventory) leaves you a retail margin rather than a wholesale one, and that margin headroom is exactly what B2B success on Amazon demands, because you need room to offer tiered bulk discounts and to respond to quote and bulk-buy requests. You also keep control of your retail pricing, and 3P generally gives you far more data to optimise with.
His practical counsel is to value the optionality early. When you are new, you can usually go either way, assuming Amazon wants to buy you in 1P, and choices only narrow from there. Above roughly ten million dollars in size, brands often find themselves locked into a 1P relationship, though it is not a hard rule. 3P is more work and is self-service, which is where agencies earn their place, while 1P behaves like a traditional wholesale account with thinner data on the B2B side.
Get two foundations right before anything else: pricing and content. On pricing, a single price is not enough; you want multiple tiers that reward quantity, so a buyer taking a hundred or a thousand units sees the discount. That tiered structure is effectively the price of entry for Amazon Business.
On content, remember the listing is your virtual salesperson to a technical buyer. Too many B2B brands run thin or consumer-flavoured content; you do not want families frolicking through a field, you want a plumber installing the product in a commercial kitchen, plus the compatibility and technical attributes a tradesperson actually evaluates.
With those in place, the rest of the toolkit opens up: request-for-quote, entry into Amazon's bulk-buy and managed-spend programs, industry-vertical pricing, and Amazon Business advertising, which launched in May 2025 and, Beck reports, is driving outsized returns for clients even though it takes a different skill set from consumer ads.
Some manufacturers go further and stand up commercial storefronts, occasionally on a separate 3P or 1P account dedicated to the business offer. For a fuller walkthrough of the channel, MerchantSpring's session on B2B sales on Amazon for mid-market manufacturers is a useful companion, and its Amazon vendor acronym glossary helps with the 1P, 3P and RFQ shorthand.
Not every SKU belongs on Amazon, but Beck's stronger warning is that manufacturers hold back far too much out of fear. Start by discarding your assumptions about what can sell; get a cheap Amazon Business account and watch what actually moves in your category. Then think about Amazon relative to your other channels through one lens: the value each channel delivers to the end buyer.
Products that need heavy consultative selling, engineering a whole HVAC system into a building, still belong with a distributor who configures the solution. But the components a buyer already knows they want can go through Amazon Business, and as long as you manage retail pricing consistently across channels, you avoid the conflict people fear. A good product does not get dropped by a distributor simply because it also sells on Amazon.
Two practical notes reinforce the point. On tax, 3P sellers benefit from US marketplace-facilitator laws under which Amazon collects and remits sales tax on your behalf for both consumer and business orders, and Amazon Business lets buyers submit exemption certificates through the portal for tax-exempt or reuse purchases.
And on supply constraints, 3P gives you a useful on-off switch: you can restrict or pause a product when inventory is tight, which matters because several of Enceiba's larger clients report that Amazon is now their single most profitable channel. That last fact is the one most likely to change a board's mind, and the one worth verifying with your own numbers before you decide what to list.
The strongest argument for Amazon Business is profitability, and the only way to settle it is to measure the channel against your others. MerchantSpring gives sellers, agencies and enterprise brands one view of performance and profitability across Amazon accounts and channels, so you can see whether Amazon really is your most profitable route to the B2B buyer. See it on your own accounts with a walkthrough of your data.