4 ways Amazon Business shoppers behave differently
.png)
If you don’t have an Amazon Business strategy, you’re missing out.
Business buyers—who purchase bulk products on behalf of companies, whether those are office supplies, lab equipment, or CPG drinks—are inevitably going to be some of your biggest spenders.
B2B buyers have a 3x higher conversion rate, 2-3x higher ROI, and a 50% lower return rate than typical shoppers.
And Amazon now gives you a lot more control over B2B targeting.
You can bid boost Sponsored Ads specifically for B2B buyers, target your DSP ads to B2B audiences, and run analytics on your Business performance within Amazon Marketing Cloud.
FYI: We’re discussing how to create a scaled B2B strategy in our webinar with Amazon on Wednesday (November 4), which you should register for now if you haven’t already.
For now, though, we want to highlight a few reasons why having a distinctive Business strategy is so important. Namely: Because your Business buyers behave differently than your regular customers.
How Amazon Business shoppers are different from regular consumers
Here’s what to know when crafting your Amazon Business strategy.
Business buyers purchase at different times of the week. A good B2B strategy should be attentive to the times of day—and days of the week—that you’re running ads.
Amazon Business buyers purchase at different times than regular Amazon consumers.
First of all, they’re far more likely to buy on weekdays than on weekends. B2B ads that run over the weekend are therefore going to see a lot lower returns.
B2B buyers also are much more likely to browse and buy within the confines of a typical workday, so be careful about ads you run in the evening hours.
To create a B2B-specific dayparting plan, you might want to create a B2B-specific Sponsored Products campaign. From there, using Amazon Marketing Stream data, you can analyze the distinctive buying times of your Business shoppers, and set up hour-by-hour bidding strategies accordingly.
This is all easy to do within Intentwise Optimize, for what it’s worth.
They might have a slightly different path to conversion. The reality is that your Business shoppers might have a very different path to purchase than regular Amazon buyers.
We’ve seen it vary across the board. Sometimes Business shoppers discover your products in a pretty similar manner as regular consumers. Other times their path looks dramatically different.
You should always double check the best multi-touch ads strategy in AMC before pushing too hard in one direction.
In Amazon Marketing Cloud, you can run a path to purchase query and filter specifically for business buyers to see how your B2B path stacks up. Adjust your campaign tactics accordingly.
They might take longer to convert. B2B buyers are certainly high-converting, but they might not actually be fast-converting.
We’ve often seen that Business shoppers are a little slow to purchase.
This seems to be especially true for Business buyers from large companies, who might have to get clearance and buy-in from multiple stakeholders before they can make their purchase.
So even when one B2B buyer is convinced by your product, they might need to get approval first, which can slow down the purchase timeline.
A good way of assessing if your Business buyers are slower-converting than your regular shoppers is to run a Time to Conversion query in AMC, and segment it out for B2B buyers vs. regular consumers.
If B2B buyers are in fact notably slower to purchase, it might be worth rethinking your retargeting windows.
Rather than send a follow-up ad to warm shoppers a few days after they first visited your PDP, maybe you want to wait a week or so, so you don’t cannibalize shoppers who were planning to convert anyway.
They have very high LTV. It’s probably worth spending a fair bit more on advertising to court Business shoppers than it is to reach regular consumers. According to Amazon, B2B buyers spend 80% more units in their cart than your typical shopper.
Yet, amazingly, they don’t only buy a lot upfront. Amazon Business shoppers also love to re-order.
At a fundamental level, bidding up to reach B2B shoppers specifically is often worth it.
That’s why we are such big fans of B2B bid boosting, which is one of the main topics of our webinar with Amazon this week. (Sign up now if you haven’t already.)
More so than regular consumers, Business buyers tend to reorder products often, and on predictable schedules. That’s because their office will, say, run out of supplies around the same time, or they’ll make a big purchase of snacks on the first of every month.
To entice Business buyers, your products should be set up with benefits for repeat purchasing. It’s worth it to offer a Subscribe & Save option for business buyers, or of course to allow for bulk or frequent reorder discounts.