One Year In: What Australian Businesses Want to Know About Amazon Business
One year ago, we launched Amazon Business in Australia. The response has been extraordinary.
Thousands of organisations, from sole traders to ASX-listed enterprises, have joined, and the momentum is accelerating: orders have grown 155% in our second half compared to the first six months, with 50%+ average quarter-on-quarter growth. Product selection has expanded 9x across technology, education, healthcare, and industrial supplies, and Australian businesses have collectively saved hundreds of thousands of dollars through Business Pricing, Quantity Discounts, and free shipping.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. In hundreds of conversations with procurement leaders this year, the same questions keep coming up regardless of organisation size or maturity. Below, we address the five most common topics and show how Amazon Business can help wherever you are on your procurement journey.
Getting Started: "We just want our people to start buying without the red tape."
This is the most common starting point we hear, especially from growing small businesses and teams that have outgrown the office credit card.
The short answer: you don't need a complex setup before anyone can place an order.
Here's how it works. You create a free Amazon Business account, invite your team, and they start purchasing immediately by accessing much of the broad selection from Amazon.com.au, plus business-only pricing and quantity discounts from eligible sellers. No mandatory filters. No compulsory approval chains. No guided buying policies required on day one.
If your primary goal is getting your team off personal expense reports and onto a single, visible account as quickly as possible that's a perfectly valid way to start. Layer in controls later as your needs evolve.
"We decided to partner with Amazon Business because of the features that it offered. Amazon Business is helping us solve procurement challenges by providing us with different suppliers, all on the one platform. With the ease of single sign-on, it just connects our system to Amazon. We don't have to create multiple passwords. It's just easy and efficient and seamless."
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Compliance: "Tax compliance and internal procurement rules are non-negotiable in Australia. Can we enforce them on Amazon Business?"
We hear this constantly, especially from finance teams and public sector organisations with strict audit requirements. The short answer: yes, and you can do it without relying on manual checks or chasing missing invoices after the fact.
Amazon Business Australia gives you two levers to enforce compliance at the point of purchase:
- Tax Invoice Filters: Your buyers can filter search results to show only offers that provide instantly downloadable tax invoices.
- Guided Buying Policies: Set organisation-wide purchasing guardrails that guide your buyers before they check out, not after. Administrators create policies to prefer, restrict, or block products and sellers based on attributes like seller certification, product category, or sustainability credentials. Buyers see clear visual cues throughout their shopping experience, so the right purchasing decisions become the easy ones. Learn more about Guided Buying
The result: a "compliance by default" posture across your entire organisation with no post-purchase remediation and no awkward conversations with cardholders about missing invoices.
Integration: "We need this to plug into our existing procurement systems."
Amazon Business integrates with your existing systems in multiple ways. For organisations using Coupa, SAP Ariba, ZipHQ, Oracle, and many others we have Punchout integration paths already running in production across Australia. For custom or in-house platforms, our Search and Direct Ordering APIs let you embed Amazon's selection and pricing directly into your own tools. And with Single Sign-On (SSO), your team authenticates once through your identity provider with no separate Amazon credentials to manage.
However your systems are set up, the goal is the same: Amazon's selection and pricing, without asking your team to learn a new tool or breaking your existing controls. The question isn't whether Amazon Business fits your current environment, but how quickly you can connect it.
"The buying experience really is a key asset and a key benefit to our relationship with Amazon Business. It goes through our Oracle platform at the end. Even the invoicing just happens as simply as it needs to. The items get delivered and everyone can move on with doing what they need to do."
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Visibility: "I have no idea what my people are actually buying on their cards."
This is the one that keeps procurement managers up at night. They have dozens or even hundreds of cardholders making independent purchasing decisions with spending fragmented across suppliers. Category insights are almost non-existent and contract compliance becomes a guess at best.
The numbers back it up: according to research by Lonergan Research commissioned by Amazon Business, over 70% of Australian business leaders say manual approval workflows delay important purchases, 65% believe they overpay due to fragmented supplier networks, and organisations lose an average of $257k annually to manual approvals, fragmented suppliers, and administrative overhead.
Amazon Business Analytics gives you real-time visibility into every dollar spent across your organisation's account (by user, by category, by time period) with data you can export for reconciliation or deeper analysis.
"We have access to the spend visibility and that's been really helpful, especially in the procurement space. I've been able to see what we spend on, how we spend. It's just a really great snapshot and it also shows our savings as well. We've been able to really see the behaviour of our spend and buying. They also show you which is the best value for money, and then we're able to make a decision based on the best decision for the business. We've achieved 19% in savings over the last three months."
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For larger organisations, Spend Visibility takes this further by consolidating reporting across all your Amazon Business activity, with the ability to identify savings opportunities, track adoption, and benchmark against your own targets.
Whether you manage five buyers or five hundred, the data is there with no manual expense report aggregation required.
Tailored for B2B: "Is this actually different from just using regular Amazon?"
Yes, and the differences matter more than you might expect. Beyond business-only pricing and quantity discounts, an Amazon Business account gives you:
- Multi-user access under a single organisational account
- Approval workflows you can configure to match your delegation of authority
- Tax invoice availability surfaced and enforceable at the point of purchase
- Shared payment methods so individuals don't need to use personal cards
- Reporting and analytics across your entire team's activity
- System integration with your existing SSO, procurement, and ERP platforms
A personal Amazon account gives you a great consumer shopping experience. An Amazon Business account turns that same experience into a procurement tool built for Australian organisations with the controls, compliance, and visibility your team needs.
What's Next?
We're continuing to invest in features that Australian businesses are asking for. Our roadmap is shaped directly by the feedback we receive from customers of all sizes.
If you haven't set up your free Amazon Business account yet, there's never been a better time. And if you're already using Amazon Business and have a question we haven't answered here, reach out. We're listening.
Get started with Amazon Business
Amazon Business is free to join and available to all registered Australian businesses. Visit business.amazon.com.au to create your account.
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