Amazon Business has typically trailed behind Wall Street analysts in publicizing information about its gross sales as its growth has surged.

In 2021, when Amazon Business announced it had reached $25 billion in annualized gross sales the prior year, that 2020 gross sales figure had been projected three years earlier by Colin Sebastian, managing director and ecommerce analyst at investment firm R.W. Baird & Co.

Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon.com Inc.

Amazon.com Inc. CEO Andy Jassy, in his 2022 letter to shareholders posted on Amazon’s website today, says that Amazon Business “drives roughly $35 billion in annualized gross sales,” including third-party sellers’ as well as Amazon’s own sales transactions on the dominant B2B marketplace.

“We believe that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible to date, and plan to keep building the features our business customers tell us they need and want,” Jassy says in the letter, which Amazon posted on it website today.

Wall Street analysts agree that Amazon Business has only scratched the surface. Sebastian, for one, has projected that Amazon Business will reach $80 billion in gross sales by 2025. Other Wall Street analysts have also come out with lofty projections.

Jassy says Amazon Business has thrived even during tough economic times because it has listened to and learned from customers, resulting in innovations in the customer experience as they purchase among “hundreds of millions of business supplies” on the B2B marketplace.

Amazon Business rolls out new buying features

The initial B2B services Amazon Business offered when it launched in 2015 included features that let account holders maintain multi-user accounts, share payment methods, and access and review analytics data on what a company’s buyers were purchasing.

Since then, Amazon Business has expanded services to include free shipping for Business Prime members, which can extend to thousands of buyers from the same company, and the Guided Buying program, which lets companies establish spending rules for its employees.

The Guided Buying program also supports the ability of companies to direct more of their purchasing to sellers on Amazon Business who meet their diversity and sustainability requirements, including minority- and women-owned businesses and sustainable products shown to be environmentally friendly.

In addition, Amazon Business says it has increased its sales and account services with large enterprise and expanded the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to better match customer demand with available products from suppliers.

AWS, or the Amazon Web Services cloud technology unit, “is now an $85 billion annual revenue run-rate business with strong profitability,” Jassy says in the shareholders letter.

Colin Sebastian, managing director and ecommerce analyst at R.W. Baird & Co., will speak on B2B ecommerce investment trends in a “Follow the Money” presentation at the EnvisionB2B 2023 Conference & Exhibition in June in Chicago.

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