Is B2B Ready to Be Amazon’ed?

They’re Coming for You Next: Amazon Hits $10 Billion in B2B Sales

In another amazing growth story from the giant in the Northwest, Amazon has gone from $1 billion to $10 billion in online B2B sales in less than 3 years.  If Amazon didn’t get onto the radar of B2B players with their announcement of Amazon Prime for Business, then they should have gotten their attention with their latest announcement: Amazon Business tops $10 billion annual revenue run rate.

Counting more than half of the Fortune 100 as customers, Amazon touted its accomplishment in a blog post, explaining in depth about their breadth of customers, their international expansion, innovation and the growth of 3rd party sellers. Amazon highlights their dedication to innovation stating, “We continuously innovate on behalf of customers. . . . We are able to integrate directly into e-procurement systems and create intuitive buying experiences.”

RichRelevance was born out of Amazon a decade ago by the engineers who built their Personalization Engine.  We knew then that Amazon would leverage personalization to drive frictionless commerce, cloud margins to offer the lowest prices, and collect even more data (yours and all who sell on Amazon … see the fate of fashion brands facing Amazon’s private labels – 200 of them now by category).

The question is how are you going to protect your category?
Are you going to be the “Amazon” of your category?

Future blog, I’ll write about one of our B2B customers, CDW, and how they have already been investing to ensure their place in their category.  Stay tuned.