Amazon wants to be your one-stop shop for business supplies

Despite deepening its cloud offerings and playing with AI (among other things), Amazon says it remains committed to ecommerce and hopes to be your company’s go-to supplier for all things business supplies.

The pandemic, which saw Amazon lay off more than 27,000 workers in a drastic reduction to its headcount, left many businesses turning to online vendors for their office supplies. With Amazon proving to be resilient, the company has announced plans to expand some of its services (via Reuters (opens in new tab)).

Gross sales for Amazon Business in Europe grew substantially over the course of the pandemic, and it is here that the company looks to be making its most impactful move in terms of office supplies.

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Amazon Business VP Alexandre Gagnon said in an interview that the division is spending on logistics in order to accommodate the larger orders typically associated with company purchases, like desks, chairs, and printers.

Smaller consumables, like inks and toners, paper, stapling equipment, and more, will also be available under the program.

Gagnon explained that “because businesses buy in larger quantities, the fulfilment economics are more advantageous,” and as such bulk-buying discounts would be likely.

In a continued effort to optimize its cost efficiency, Amazon has already announced plans to reduce its spend on physical locations. US and UK book stores and pop-up shops are set to close, as are its so-called 4-star shops which it introduced late in 2018 to showcase items “rated 4 stars and above, is a top seller, or is new and trending on Amazon.com.”

Amazon Business is a similarly new venture, having launched in Germany in 2016 and rolled out to other European countries like the UK, France, Spain, and Italy in later years.

When TechRadar Pro asked whether Amazon Business had any further details to share, a company spokesperson told us that the news was only part of a discussion between it and Reuters “on the side-lines of Amazon Business Exchange 2023,” and that “there is nothing further to add there.”