Amazon’s Billion-Dollar Marketplace Milestone

Amazon Business is in … well … business.

Reuters reports that Amazon’s business marketplace, across which businesses and suppliers connect, has generated $1 billion in sales in its first year.

Catering to businesses in the U.S., Amazon Business — which first launched on April 28, 2015 — offers those organizations some of the same shopping benefits that it does individual consumers, such as two-day free shipping on orders of $49 or more, as well as additional features, notes Reuters, like exclusive pricing, discounts for buying in bulk and tax exemptions.

“We are continuing to grow at a rate of 20 percent month on month, and that highlights … how strong the need is in this segment,” Amazon Vice President Prentis Wilson told the outlet.

With sales on its businesses marketplace accounting for more than 40 percent of Amazon’s total sales overall, the Reuters story points out that it has helped to firmly establish the eCommerce giant in the online B2B space, which Forrester Research estimates will constitute about 12 percent of all B2B sales in the United States by 2020.

Wilson told the outlet that his company has added more than 30,000 sellers to Amazon Business, along with more than 300,000 businesses, in the past year, with “thousands of customers” being added on a weekly basis.

Some of those existing Amazon Business customers, Reuters shares, include Cardinal Financial Corp., Henkel & Co. and institutions like the University of California-San Diego and the University of Illinois, while some of the most commonly sold products on the online business marketplace include computer and information technology equipment, office supplies, lab equipment and food service supplies.