Amazon Business Guides

The pages in this section cover features rather than decisions. They exist because Amazon documents each of them across several help articles with different vocabulary, and because almost every third-party write-up gets the free-versus-paid line wrong on at least one of them.

The free/paid line, since it decides all three

Two of the three features below are free. That is not the impression most guides leave, so it is worth stating plainly before you read them:

Tax-exempt purchasing is free. Enrollment in the Amazon Tax Exemption Program sits on the free account. If you hold a valid certificate, you do not need to buy anything. The enrollment walkthrough covers the process and — more usefully — the documents Amazon explicitly will not accept, which is where nonprofits most often get stuck.

Multi-user accounts and approvals are free. You can invite buyers, set per-user permissions, and route orders to an approver without a membership. That guide marks exactly where the free version stops and the paid Guided Buying feature begins.

Extended payment terms are not free, and they carry a second gate on top of the fee. Pay by Invoice and net terms explains why "buy the Small tier and get 45-day terms" is an overstatement of what Amazon actually promises.

Which guide you need

You are a nonprofit, school, church or reseller. Start with tax-exempt purchasing. It is the highest-value free feature on the platform for you, and the enrollment has real failure modes worth reading about before you attempt it. Segment specifics are on Amazon Business for nonprofits.

Cash-flow timing is your problem. Go to net terms. Be aware it forces a tier decision — 45-day terms are a Small tier benefit at $499/year, not something you can add to Essentials.

Several people need to order, or somebody keeps buying the wrong thing. Multi-user accounts and approvals. Note that "review it afterwards" and "stop it happening" are different features at different prices — Guided Buying and purchasing policies covers the paid side, and only the Enterprise tier can block a purchase outright.

Somebody keeps spending more than there is. That is a different feature again — budgets and spending limits covers Budget Management, the one control that stops an order at checkout instead of reviewing it afterwards. It is filed under Blanket Purchase Orders, which is why most people never find it, and Amazon states accounts using Punchout cannot enable it at all.

You want to buy cheaper rather than differently. Start with bulk buying and quantity discounts — Amazon says discounts start from as low as two units — then Request for Quote if a single item clears $10,000 or 999 units, and recurring deliveries and Restock for the Subscribe & Save threshold most buyers miss.

Your problem is paperwork, not price. Purchase orders and PO numbers, invoices and receipts, accounting integration and returns and refunds cover the record-keeping side, and Spend Visibility and reporting explains which reporting is free and which is not.

You buy across several sites, or for a public body. Multiple shipping addresses covers the shared-address setup, punchout and procurement integration covers connecting an e-procurement system, and cooperative purchasing contracts lists the agreements Amazon names for education and government.

How these pages are sourced

Every factual claim in this section links an Amazon-owned page — the plan page or a specific help-center article — rather than another guide. That is deliberate: competitors are the ones with the stale figures, and citing them is precisely how inaccuracy propagates. Our methodology page explains the rule and how to check any claim here yourself.

Where Amazon hedges its own wording — "may have access to", "upon approval", "eligible orders" — we keep the hedge rather than upgrading it into a promise. If you find a claim here stated more confidently than Amazon states it, that is an error and we would like to hear about it.