Improve your delivery experience

In a survey conducted by Amazon Business among 867 purchasing decision makers in 2019, we found that 'shipping options that fit my organization’s needs’ was the sixth most important driver of choice of a purchasing solution from a list of 16 benefits we tested¹. Organizations like yours want their employees to obtain the essential items they need for work—when, where, and how they need them.

To meet this need, you can customize your delivery experience by specifying preferences for shipments fulfilled by Amazon using Amazon Logistics. Purchasers in your organization can set these preferences for their individual shipments. As an administrator, you can set preferences for all your eligible account shipments. This helps promote a consistent and improved delivery experience across all your locations and reduces the time spent by multiple purchasers in setting delivery preferences for the same location.

On Amazon Business, you can:

Choose the day and time you want shipments delivered²: How many times have you had shipments delivered when you were not available? Amazon Business enables you to set delivery windows on workdays when you’d like your shipments delivered. This will reduce deliveries during hours when your business is closed.

Provide customized instructions for seamless delivery³: Many organizations have different delivery points at the same location, multiple entrances to those locations, different entry codes etc. To optimize your deliveries, you can provide customized instructions such as:

• Note specific drop-off point to deliver shipments (e.g. loading dock, mail-room, front desk etc.)
• Provide an access code or callbox number to enter the location
• Offer instructions such as how to find the loading dock
• Provide instructions about which entrance to use and what to do if you are not available etc.

Specify holiday closures: By default, we assume that your locations cannot receive shipments on federal holidays. You can let us know which of your locations can receive shipments on each federal holiday. In addition to federal holidays, you can also let us know other holidays on which your locations are closed and whether they can or cannot receive shipments on those days.

Consolidate shipments for delivery: You can now choose one or two days of the week to receive eligible deliveries from Amazon (Amazon Day – Available only to Business Prime members). This helps consolidate orders to your account on a single day making deliveries more consistent. Consolidating also reduces the number of boxes, which helps reduce waste.

Leverage same-day shipping: You can opt for fast same-day shipping for eligible items (available only to Business Prime members). Often these deliveries occur outside normal business hours. If your business can accept evening deliveries, simply turn on same-day shipping.

Opt for pallet delivery: If your business can receive pallets, you can indicate that as a preference for large deliveries. Amazon Business will prioritize eligible shipments for delivery on a pallet at no additional cost.

Upload shipping addresses in bulk: You can upload multiple shipping addresses and share them with different groups within your organization. All you need is a spreadsheet with all the addresses, and you can upload them to the groups that you want.  Once uploaded, purchasers in those groups can have their shipments delivered to any of those addresses. This eliminates the need for them to add those addresses. This also avoids the possibility of address proliferation and errors due to individual purchasers adding the addresses, and consolidates shipments to addresses that you upload. To upload addresses in bulk, visit Addresses within Business Settings. From the Addresses page, select Add an address and Upload addresses for instructions on uploading addresses using a spreadsheet template.

Setup Recurring Deliveries: Your purchasers can save time by setting up Recurring Deliveries at a cadence of your choice on items they purchase most often. They can also save money in the process by earning 5 percent discount on eligible items and 10 percent on eligible items fulfilled by Amazon.

To learn more about how your organization can improve its delivery experience with Amazon Business, please visit this page.

How to set Delivery Preferences

If you are Amazon Business customer, you can follow the below steps to customize delivery preferences. If you are not a customer, create a free account and take advantage of Amazon Business’ delivery capabilities.

If you are a group administrator for your organization’s Amazon Business account:

1.   Visit Business Settings and navigate to Billing and Shipping and select Addresses.

2.   To add delivery instructions for a specific address, select Edit Delivery Preferences under Actions.

If you are an account administrator for your organization’s Amazon Business account:

1.   Visit Business Settings and navigate to Billing and Shipping and select Delivery preferences.

2.   Select Edit to update Delivery times, Amazon Day, Same-Day Delivery, and Observed holidays.

If you are a purchaser:

1.   Visit Your Account under Ordering and shopping preferences, select Your addresses.

2.   Click on Edit Delivery Preferences for the address for which you want to customize preferences.

_Sources:

_{[1] 2019 Brand Foundations Quantitative Research conducted by Amazon Business: 15-minute online survey among buyer decision makers in the US belonging to the healthcare, commercial, education, and government verticals. Sample = 867. In a trade-off exercise consisting of 16 benefits, the eight benefits listed in this article were relatively more important in evaluating a new purchasing solution. These benefits were defined as being relatively more important because their importance scores exceeded the average importance score of all the attributes. The average importance score was 100. The eight benefits we have described in this article have a score equal to or greater than 100 resulting in them being more important than the other benefits that we tested. Survey question: Which of the following benefits are most and least important to you when evaluating new purchasing solutions for your organization?}

_{[2] Applies to shipments from Amazon Logistics.}

_{[3] Applies to shipments from Amazon Logistics.}