The Amazon Business Mobile App

Most articles about a retailer's mobile app are not worth writing. This one is, for a specific reason: two of the controls that make Amazon Business worth using at all — approvals and goods receipting — are bottlenecked on somebody being at a computer, and the app is what unblocks them.

What Amazon lists

Grouped by what they are actually for:

Control, on the move

• Real-time updates on order and approval requests, with push notifications you can enable for both.
• Manage and implement buying policies from the device.
• Manage users, payments and addresses.

An approval workflow that adds two days to every order because the approver is on site all week is a control people route around. One that pings a phone is a control people keep. Multi-user accounts and approvals covers the mechanism the notification is attached to.

The scanner, which does two jobs

• Scan product barcodes and images to compare prices and check availability. Useful when you are standing in front of a shelf deciding whether to reorder.
• Scan the package barcode on arrival to automatically complete a 3-Way Match.

The second is the more valuable and the less known. Receiving confirmation is exactly the task that gets skipped when it means walking a delivery note to an office, and it is exactly the task that makes invoice reconciliation trustworthy. Turn on receiving tracking, put the app on the phone of whoever meets the delivery driver, and the control runs itself — 3-Way Match and receiving has the setup.

Buying lists

Amazon describes creating and sharing custom buying lists for frequently purchased items. For any organization that reorders the same twenty consumables, this is the difference between a correct reorder and a nearly-correct one. It pairs with recurring deliveries and restock — lists for the things somebody decides on, subscriptions for the things nobody should have to.

Paperwork

Invoices download from the Orders page in the app, and purchases can be tracked there. Modest, but it removes a common excuse for the receipt never reaching finance — invoices and receipts.

The separation argument

There is a structural reason to use the dedicated app rather than switching accounts inside the consumer one. Amazon presents it as the way to keep business purchases separate from personal shopping — two apps, two accounts, no chance of buying company printer paper on your own card or a birthday present on the company's.

That matters more than convenience. Amazon's acceptable use rules do not permit personal buying on a business account, and administrators can see order history on the business side. Keeping the two in separate apps is the simplest way to never test either point — personal use rules and logging in to Amazon Business cover the alternative, which is the Switch Accounts menu.

Single sign-on in the app

Amazon lists Single Sign-on among the app's features. For organizations that have already federated their identity provider this is the piece that makes mobile access safe to hand out widely: access follows employment, and removing someone from your directory removes them here too. See setting up single sign-on.

Who should install it

Anyone who approves orders. The notification is the whole point.

Anyone who receives deliveries at a site with no desk — which is most of contractors and jobsites, property management and landscaping and lawn care, where the mark everything received step would otherwise never happen.

Anyone reordering from a stockroom rather than from a screen. Scanning the empty box beats retyping a product name from memory.

It is not a substitute for the desktop account for administration work — group structures, exemption enrollment and reporting are still desk-shaped jobs. But it removes the two delays that most often make a well-designed purchasing process fall apart in practice.