Amazon Makes Good on Business-to-Business Threat
The e-commerce giant is rapidly gaining a foothold in this space, and incumbents such as Grainger should be worried.
Coming through.
Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
Amazon.com Inc. is no longer a looming threat for sellers of factory-floor basics, lab equipment and office products. It’s a full-blown competitor.
The e-commerce giant rattled distributors of industrial parts, IT and medical supplies in 2015 when it launched a business-to-business platform that promised to make ordering supplies as easy and price-transparent as ordering diapers or toothpaste. On Tuesday, it said that platform, Amazon Business, had hit an annualized rate of $10 billion in global sales. That compares with $1 billion in U.S. sales in its first year of existence before Amazon expanded the platform into other countries including the U.K., Germany and Japan.