You may not have heard of Amazon Business, but it more than likely plays a huge role in how well your company operates on a daily basis.
Providing a marketplace to over eight million business customers across ten regions, Amazon Business sells everything from laptops to beakers, playing a key role for companies of all sizes.
Ahead of the company’s ABX 2025 event in London, I spoke to Shelley Salomon, Global VP, Amazon Business, to find out just how challenging it is to offer everything needed to run a company these days.
“Smart business buying”
Despite celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2025 many everyday people might not know Amazon Business exists – as Salomon notes, “we’re a pretty young part of Amazon – we like to call it one of our fastest growing startups – we’re still a start-up, even though we’re a very large business!”
She notes how the company has shifted from purely servicing smaller businesses to now also covering huge multi-national firms, as well as educational organizations, governments and more, adding more complex capabilities around invoicing, delivery and procurement challenges.
Salomon says it is “uniquely positioned to connect our customers with our seller community”, with third-party sales making up a large part of sales on the platform, meaning it offers a huge range of potential options to shoppers, and a huge opportunity for smaller sellers as well.
Noting, “customer obsession is at the heart of what we do,” Salomon notes the importance of offering the same opportunities to business customers as they get in their personal Amazon shopping experience.
“Why can’t we offer people at work the same selection, price and convenience that they have in their personal life, that they’ve grown to love and trust?” she asks.
At the heart of this is the idea of “smart business buying”, which Salomon notes is down to selection, price and convenience – “and you’re never done doing that, by the way – there’s always something you can do better,” she laughs.
The company also looks to offer insights, analytics and other tools to its customers, including a new spend anomaly alert, which uses AI tracking to spot any possible fraud or payment issues.
She notes business customers all want to save time and money – but they want to balance out the ability to still have oversight and governance, but also give users the freedom and flexibility to move quickly, buy what they want, and not have too many constraints on what they’re buying.
Salomon notes business customers, “are very different from each other” – whereas consumers typically buy more, less, different products in common patterns, business shoppers are so diverse in size, segment and goals, the need for a substantial platform such as Amazon Business is vital.
With this reach comes the responsibility – especially in these tumultuous economic times, with Salomon noting the wider macroeconomic issues such as tariffs across the EU and US – but the fact it has such a broad set of suppliers allows Amazon Business to be pretty resistant, offering it more scale and resilience with its ability to serve a diverse set of customers.
“Amazon is very helpful to small and local businesses,” she notes, “particularly the ability to have access to all of these customers.”
“They want to be getting the best technology at the best time…they want the flexibility and speed to order what they want, but they want the benefit of scale.”
I ask Salomon how with this sheer scale, the company stays focused in its strategy. She admits given the range, things can become fragmented, but it also spends a lot of time on areas which affect all its customers – “whichever way you want to receive the products, we will offer those to you.”
“With scale comes great responsibility,” she says, “and so now that Amazon is a large company, we do feel a sense of responsibility to help the likes of small, diverse and other businesses be successful – either as our suppliers or as our customers.”