Amazon Business has launched a new Buy Local feature in Europe, giving Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) and their teams the ability to identify sellers on a country or even city level, make local purchasing decisions, and invest in local businesses.
With Buy Local, Amazon Business now empowers procurement executives to quickly implement business-wide policies that highlight preferred local sellers through customised local areas and price limits. All buyers across an organisation are able to see local procurement options among the various competitive offers, ensuring that large enterprises can empower hundreds of employees to follow the same buying policy and easily find local supplies.
Procurement has a strategic role in achieving the local purchasing targets of an organisation. In a recent Amazon Business survey, 90% of procurement executives said investing in local communities was one of their procurement goals.
Fabricio Pedroza, General Manager, UK&I: “Sourcing products and services from local businesses offers a huge opportunity, but at the same time, it is challenging to change existing supply chains, particularly within bigger companies. We created Buy Local feature on Amazon stores with the aim of making this easy and achievable for CPOs by simplifying the local buying process at scale across their organisation, enabling them to buy more locally and responsibly, while fulfilling today’s and future targets.”
Buy Local also comes with access to Amazon Business Analytics reporting tools so any spend made locally can be easily tracked, managed and reported on against corporate and team goals. This gives CPOs the information they need to make faster, more strategic decisions. With real-time data, leaders can drive progress towards local purchasing goals, optimise the process, forecast future budgets, and develop policies to help guide buyer spending.
In the UK, several customers who took part in the initial roll out of Buy Local are already spending up to 40%1 of their Amazon Business procurement budgets through Buy Local, whereas in Europe, they are spending between 37% and 50% (up to 50%1 in Germany, up to 45%1 in France, more than 40%1 in Italy, and 37%1 in Spain). Certain key sectors are leading adoption of the feature, for example, Amazon Business healthcare customers in the UK increased their spend with local sellers by more than 20%1 during the initial roll out. Other industries such as the public sector, big city administrators and government bodies, as well as education, construction and technology are also making use of the feature, enabling hundreds of employees to choose to support local businesses and buy from local sellers.
In addition to increased buying from local suppliers, hundreds of customers across Europe, from sectors including leading universities, automobile manufacturers and technology, are also using Amazon Business’ features such as Guided Buying that empowers companies to direct spend toward any number of priorities or Amazon Business’s application programming interfaces (API) to automate time-consuming manual tasks, allowing buyers to easily find and order supplies such as Climate Pledge Friendly products within their existing purchasing tools. These features allow procurement leaders to set company-wide guided buying policies, which can enable hundreds or even thousands of buyers within individual companies to spend on more sustainable products. When combined with the launch of Buy Local, procurement leaders are being empowered to help their organisations fulfil a broad range of local purchasing targets.
