We’ve discovered an interesting and downside for shoppers on Amazon Business. Amazon are displaying products as ‘Temporarily out of stock’ when if you shop on the main Amazon site the product is freely available. This means, that for business buyers, selection is likely to be narrower then for regular Amazon customers.
This was discovered by Josh of Cheerful Bargains, who both sells on Amazon and Business as well as being an Amazon Business buyer. The main image above shows the display on Amazon Business with the out of stock message, whilst the image below shows what a regular Amazon customer would see with the product clearly in stock.
There could be any number of reasons that this is occuring but to date it’s not been possible to nail down what the glitch is. There is definitely different stock availability compared to logging in as a regular buyer but we’re not sure if for some reason Josh’s products haven’t been indexed, if Amazon prefer to list their own items if they sell them, or if it’s just a glitch.
What’s do we learn about Amazon Business from this glitch?
Whilst this is an unusual situation, it does highlight the fact that if you don’t join Amazon Business then your products will definitely show as out of stock. Even if there’s another seller with higher prices than you, they’ll still get the deal and your offers simply won’t be displayed to Amazon Business customers.
Signing up for Amazon Business is free and the work of a few minutes. It’s hard to find many reasons why you wouldn’t want to attract business buyers to your offers, especially as if nothing else they’re likely to be less problematic than consumer buyers.
4 Responses
I think you are mistaken. In the first screenshot, the buy box is given to Amazon, presumably because they charge VAT in their price, thus giving them the lowest net price (I’m assuming). The 2nd screenshot is from a third party merchant. Since it is aimed at a non-business account, it is comparing the gross price of all offers rather than the net, thus giving the buy box to the cheaper seller.
Update: just noticed this is true because the first screenshot shows the net price as £11.25 vs the £11.82 for the non-business view.
“It’s hard to find many reasons why you wouldn’t want to attract business buyers to your offers”
As I understand it you have to sign up for Amazon to handle VAT for you.
A. Amazon don’t do it correctly.
B. We prefer to have all of our sales recorded in our accounts for VAT returns.
C. We prefer to provide customers with our own branded invoice.