Mention competition in the world of business-to-business e-commerce, and the name AmazonSupply invariably pops up as the player to be most aware of.
AmazonSupply.com, the B2B e-commerce site Amazon.com Inc. launched in 2012, is also a hotbed in the e-commerce employment market. A recent search on Amazon’s employment openings site, Amazon.jobs, found more than 50 openings, many of the posted in recent weeks, for software developers, vendor managers, product managers and other positions listed by the “Amazon Supply and Business-to-Business (B2B) team.”
“Our mission is to create a world-class commercial, industrial and scientific supply store where customers will discover, research and buy Earth’s biggest selection of everything,” Amazon says in some of the job postings, adding: “We are focused on building solutions to enable business-to-business customers to research, discover and buy business, industrial and scientific products from a vast selection, across multiple devices, marketplaces and regions.”
“Over the past 20 years,” it says in another posting, “Amazon has reinvented on behalf of the consumer and has become the largest Internet retailer and marketplace in the world with nearly 90 billion in revenue globally … Amazon is now reinventing on behalf of the business customer and focused on building the largest and most innovative Business-to-Business (B2B) marketplace in the world, and we are recruiting [to] make this vision a reality … Our B2B customers have different needs than the traditional Amazon customer so we are reinventing everything from how we display our selection, price our products, and provide the right customer experience.”
Other job listings for B2B e-commerce positions include:
Principal forecasting research scientist – B2B. “A core part of the operations is forecasting: We forecast the demand of tens of millions of products up to a year into the future,” Amazon says in the listing. “The forecasts are used to automatically order hundreds of millions worth of inventory weekly, to establish labor plans for over 10,000 employees, and to predict the company’s financial performance. B2B represents a whole new paradigm in consumption patterns versus our legacy consumer business: larger order sizes, lumpier demand and different seasonality, to name a few. Come join us in finding ways to scale our Forecasting systems to the needs of our rapidly growing B2B business.”
Quality assurance engineer – B2B Systems – Madrid, Spain. “The Amazon Business-to-Business (B2B) team is seeking a QAE who wants to disrupt the way businesses institutions purchase their supplies,” Amazon says in the listing. “Our team is focused on building solutions to enable B2B customers to research, discover and buy business, industrial and scientific products in large catalogs; across multiple devices, marketplaces and regions … You will be part of a team that is responsible for all aspects of the customer experience—from the visual interface to the back end services. Our systems need to meet remarkably high standards of quality, performance and reliability, operating around the clock on a massive scale.”
Senior vendor manager – health care products. Amazon says this position requires the manager to identify and on-board new suppliers, forecast demand for products, analyze product pricing, and recommend promotional and pricing strategies to optimize profit margin.
A search on the term “B2B” on Amazon.jobs pulls up more than 200 job openings, though many of these appear to be for positions involved with providing business services to retailers that sell through the Amazon Marketplace.
In addition to AmazonSupply, where Amazon itself owns the inventory and is always the seller of record, Amazon also processes B2B sales through the Business, Industrial & Scientific Supplies section of Amazon.com, where sales can be either from Amazon itself or from third-party marketplace sellers.
Several industry experts have commented privately recently that Amazon is considering folding AmazonSupply into the Business, Industrial & Scientific Supplies section of Amazon.com. Amazon has declined to comment. Amazon is No. in the Internet Retailer Top 500, which ranks companies by their annual web sales.
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