Amazon Business How-To

Every walkthrough in this section opens with prerequisites rather than step one, because in our reading of Amazon's own documentation that is consistently where people get stuck. The forms are short. Finding the tax identification number at 4pm on a Friday is the part that takes an afternoon.

Getting in

How to create an Amazon Business account is the full registration walkthrough. It costs nothing — there is no signup fee and no monthly charge — so the only thing standing between you and a business account is having the four items above to hand.

One decision worth making before you begin: register a new account with a business email rather than converting the personal one you already use. Converting is the single most common cause of business and personal orders getting tangled, and it is much easier to avoid than to unpick.

If you are not certain you want one yet, the honest version of that question is on is an Amazon Business account worth it — including the cases where our answer is no.

Moving up

How to upgrade to Business Prime covers buying a paid tier from an existing account. The mechanics are easy; picking the right tier is not, and getting it wrong is expensive because Amazon bills annually.

Headcount does most of the deciding. The seat caps are 5, 20 and 200 across Essentials, Small and Medium, and they are cliffs rather than a sliding scale — one user over a cap forces the entire next tier. Before upgrading anything, check the arithmetic on is Business Prime worth it, because a large share of upgrades are bought for features that are already free.

Getting out

How to cancel Business Prime exists for two reasons. The obvious one is that people need it. The less obvious one is that knowing the exit removes the main objection to trying a paid tier at all — it is much easier to start a free trial when you already know how it ends.

The critical thing that page covers: canceling the membership is not the same as closing the account. Drop Business Prime and the free tier underneath keeps business pricing, quantity discounts, multi-user access, approvals, reporting and tax exemption. People regularly cancel more than they meant to.

A note on screenshots and steps

Amazon changes its interface, and a walkthrough describing buttons that have moved is worse than no walkthrough. So these pages describe the path and the decision at each stage rather than promising a pixel-accurate match, they cite Amazon's own help pages so you can check the current version, and they carry the date we last reviewed them. Our methodology page publishes the re-verification cadence — signup steps get re-checked twice yearly, and sooner if Amazon changes the interface.