Alexandre Gagnon, vice president, Amazon Business

From 2020 to 2022, Amazon Business grew at a compound annual rate of 25%, according to Alexandre Gagnon, vice president of Amazon Business Worldwide.

To expand on that growth, Gagnon says the marketplace plans to enlarge sales of office supplies. The product category grew in recent years as the pandemic led companies to more purchasing online.

Gagnon, the top executive at Amazon Business, made his comments in an interview published today by the Reuters news service and confirmed by an Amazon Business spokeswoman.

Enhancing logistics to support B2B sales

Gagnon said Amazon Business is improving logistics operations in Europe to make it more attractive for corporate-account customers to make bulk purchases of supplies ranging from desks and IT equipment to paper and printer ink. That provides Amazon the opportunity to reap higher margins compared with small-order retail consumer sales.

“Because businesses buy in larger quantities, the fulfillment economics are more advantageous,” Gagnon told Reuters.

Amazon Business entered the European market when it opened for business in Germany in 2016, followed by Great Britain in 2017. It also operates in France, Italy and Spain. The ecommerce company deals with such corporate clients as:

• Electrical equipment manufacturer ABB
• Renewable energy technology company Siemens Gamesa
• Energy technology engineering firm Centrica Business Solutions

When asked if Amazon Business intends to enter additional markets in Europe, the spokeswoman said the company “can’t comment on future plans.”

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“We have the best program in the world,” Columbus says.

The reason for Columbus’ confidence is the retailer’s 20-minute guarantee, which it meets 98.9% of the time. That means that 20 minutes after an online shopper clicks “buy” online or in the app, the product is ready for the shopper to pick up. If not, Office Depot will give the shopper $20 off her next purchase.

“This is our differentiator, and we’re proud of it,” Columbus says.

Office Depot meets its 20-minute pickup promise 98.9% of the time.

Office Depot implemented the 20-minute guarantee in October 2021 at nearly all of its 980 stores. While shoppers were not asking for a faster pickup time than its previous one-hour guarantee, the merchant wanted to prove it could be even better, Columbus says.

“There’s a big online retailer that can’t do 20 minutes, so we can,” Columbus says.

Jamie Columbus, vice president of omnichannel at Office Depot Inc.

Plus, many small business owners may need to print out a presentation that day or have run out of ink and need more as soon as possible. They would likely be happy with the product in one hour, but 20 minutes is even better, Columbus says.

A majority of shoppers expect their online order ready for pickup in one hour or less, says Brendan Witcher, vice president, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. While not every retailer may need to exceed customer expectations with a 20-minute BOPIS guarantee, for Office Depot’s product category, it makes sense, he says.

According to a Digital Commerce 360 and Bizrate Insights survey of 1,132 online shoppers in March 2023, 32% selected BOPIS or curbside as their fulfillment choice because they wanted the product that day.

Office Depot makes changes to meet BOPIS guarantee

To reduce the time to 20 minutes from one hour, the merchant had to make operational changes at the stores to make its employees more efficient. Office Depot upgraded its hardware to Zebra mobile devices that run its inventory system software to alert employees in real time when they have to pick a time to fulfill a BOPIS order. Employees previously had handheld devices to complete this task, but the new system was better, Columbus says without providing specific details.

Office Depot also went through each task an employee has to conduct throughout the day and analyzed if tasks were necessary and the benefit of doing them. For example, sometimes employees have to specifically check an aisle for a high-end item and count how many are in stock. Office Depot decided to eliminate this task, as it did not provide enough value.

When it went live with the program, Office Depot did not have any increases in conversion or key performance indicators to prove that a faster pickup time was a differentiator for shoppers.

Columbus does, however, point to its in-store Net Promoter Score, at 72.5, as proof that shoppers are satisfied with the in-store pickup experience. Prior to this rollout, in July 2020, Office Depot’s NPS was 65.6. The average NPS, which is a widely used measure of online shopper satisfaction, for retailers is 35, according to Delighted LLC, a Qualtrics-owned survey platform.

Office Depot will continue to offer curbside pickup

About 27% of Office Depot’s online orders are for store pickup. Of those orders, 15% of customers choose to pick up curbside.

Office Depot quickly launched curbside at almost all of its stores during the 2020 pandemic. And even though fewer shoppers are opting for curbside than they did a few years ago, Office Depot plans to continue to offer curbside pickup.

“It has slowed down. We like the fact that it’s slowed down,” says Columbus.

That’s because with curbside pickup, shoppers are not entering stores and will not purchase additional items. This compares with in-store pickup, which brings shoppers inside. There, a percentage of them buy additional items, Columbus says without revealing that figure.

Digital Commerce 360 researchers found that Office Depot delivered on its 20-minute promise. It had the order ready for pickup four minutes after clicking buy, according to a mystery shopping test as part of the to-be-released Digital Commerce 360 Omnichannel Report.

From the 20 tested retailers, Office Depot was the fastest. Five merchants had orders ready in less than 30 minutes, and the median time it took merchants to have the order ready was 56 minutes, according to Digital Commerce 360.

Office Depot is No. 23 in the 2022 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000.

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The initiative, called Walmart Business, is designed to offer a one-stop shop for office supplies, furniture, food and electronics, Ashley Hubka, the senior vice president managing the program, said in an interview. Walmart is also pitching a business membership plan that dangles extra savings.

The retailer started the business website — business.walmart.com — in September with little fanfare, Hubka said. Now, having honed the product assortment based on user feedback, it’s looking to ramp up growth. The website includes an assortment of more than 100,000 items for purchasers looking to buy equipment, restock supplies and feed employees. As many as five users can share a single account.

The website is tailored to the needs of companies and nonprofits, and will provide more convenience for busy purchasing managers, Walmart said in a statement Jan. 20. That will position the company to attract new corporate shoppers, Hubka said. In the case of existing customers, it can “earn a greater share of their wallet,” Hubka said.

Walmart ranks No. 2 in the Top 1000, Digital Commerce 360’s database of the largest North American online retailers.

Website could help Walmart take larger share of sales to businesses

Walmart is betting the venture will help it encroach on rivals such as Staples Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., which stepped up efforts to woo smaller companies during the coronavirus pandemic. Wall Street analysts predict Walmart will be a slow-growing behemoth over the long term. Finding new sources of demand is a key challenge, they say.

The Bentonville, Arkansas-based company is also offering Walmart Business+, a corporate counterpart to its Walmart+ membership program for individual consumers. The business version offers free shipping, plus 2% rewards on orders of at least $250 and savings of as much as 5% on certain items in subscription orders. Both membership programs cost $98 a year.

Another membership-based company vying for business customers is Sam’s Club, Walmart’s own warehouse-store operation. Hubka said there’s enough demand for Walmart itself to win more new business-to-business sales without cannibalizing revenue at its corporate cousin.

“This will be additive to Walmart as a whole,” she said. “We believe there’s a really large market.”

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Prentis Wilson, president, Varis

Wilson, whose extensive ecommerce background includes being the first head of Amazon Business, noted the accomplishments and growth curve at Varis since he joined it as its top executive early last year:

• It acquired BuyerQuest, a platform that provides subscription-based procurement services to large companies.
• It built a team of executives formerly with Amazon Business and other major technology-focused organizations including Microsoft, Dell and the U.S. General Services Administration.
• It integrated its procurement technology with Microsoft’s widely used Dynamics 360 enterprise resource planning system, letting Dynamics users access Varis directly through their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
• It has recorded 64% annual growth in volume of managed procurement spend while retaining 100% of BuyerQuest customers and gaining new customers through references.

Varis’s growth has come at a substantial cost — which led to a Q3 net operating loss of $17 million for the unit even as it recorded $2 million in revenue — but ODP executives said Varis is nearing the end of its investment phase and is expected to soon enter a long period of substantial growth.  Varis processes sales of products across multiple categories, going far  beyond ODP’s traditional market of office supplies.

Ready to turn on the revenue flywheel

Anthony Scaglione, ODP executive vice president and chief financial officer, noted on the Q3 earnings call that Varis’s $2 million in Q3 revenue was primarily from its already established BuyerQuest subscription-based accounts for large enterprise customers, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha of the combined earnings call and investor day presentation. Going forward, he added, Varis will soon begin to grow procurement sales and services to a new broad base of companies of all sizes. “We expect that this will be the peak year of investment for Varis as we ready the platform for launch, turn on the revenue flywheel and scale the business.”

Wilson, who brought Amazon Business to more than $10 billion in annualized sales within its first six years, noted Varis’s existing customer base includes more than 21,000 locations, “including everything from manufacturing organizations to some of the world’s largest quick-serve restaurants.”

But he added that says Varis is “really excited” about providing the latest in procurement technology to small and midsized businesses.

He asserted that a lot of buyers at SMB companies “attempt to secure customer agreements or drive contract compliance, [but] it’s almost impossible because on the buy side, the technology to adhere to those contracts or to be able to direct those purchases doesn’t exist.”

“There’s a number of point solutions out there today that attempt to solve various parts of the problem,”  he added, “but nobody really integrates everything into one package.”

“That’s what Varis is doing,” Wilson said. ”We’re bringing the consumer-like super convenient buying experience that people demand and are used to in their personal lives, with a trusted network of suppliers and pre-negotiated or pre-established agreements.”

ODP projects Varis will realize a compound annual growth rate of more than 130% over the next three years to reach $120 million in revenue and become cashflow positive in 2025. In 2023, it says it will “focus on rapid deployment of marketplaces and suppliers; in 2024, it will expand payment capabilities and improve catalog and contract management, among other services.

ODP’s B2B sales grow as retail sales fall

To help Varis realize that growth, ODP said it has retained investment bankers Perella Weinberg Partners to help it identify potential strategic investors.

Varis is one of the recently realigned ODP’s four main business units. The other three are ODP Business Solutions, which offers contract sales and services to large companies; Office Depot, which includes sales to small businesses and consumers through OfficeDepot.com and physical stores; and Veyer, a supply chain and logistics services business that offers next-day delivery and other services to internal ODP units and to external customers.

For ODP’s fiscal third quarter ended Sept. 24, the company said total sales dipped by less than 1% year over year to $2.2 billion. Growth came mostly from ODP Business Solutions, where sales climbed 9% to $1.03 billion, as Varis was slack at $2 million. Sales at the Office Depot unit fell 8% to $1.13 billion. The Veyer unit’s sales, which were nearly all to internal ODP operations, fell 3% to $1.48 billion.

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MasterCard projects an 8.2% increase in in-store sales versus online growth of 4.3%. The report compares projected sales from July 14, 2022, to Sept. 5, 2022, with retail sales from July 15 to Sept. 6 last year.

Pre-COVID back-to-school comparison

The slower online growth stems from tough comparisons with the past two pandemic years, when ecommerce soared. Comparing the upcoming back-to-school season with 2019’s, the last year before COVID-19 emerged, online sales will be up 89.3%. In-store sales will be up 9.9% and total retail 18.3%, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse.

The back-to-school period will provide a gauge of how consumers balance their desire to shop with rising prices. It could be a preview for the holiday season to follow, MasterCard said in a release.

“Back-to-school is the second-biggest season for retailers and is often looked at as an early indicator of retail momentum ahead of the traditional holiday season,” says Steve Sadove, senior advisor for MasterCard and former CEO and chairman of Saks Inc. “While MasterCard SpendingPulse anticipates growth across sectors, retailers will need to find innovative ways to entice shoppers as discretionary spending potentially stretches thin as a result of increasing prices.”

Department stores, which have struggled during the pandemic, likely will see 13% growth during this back-to-school season over last year. Apparel sales, both offline and online, will increase 8.7%, MasterCard predicts.

MasterCard SpendingPulse makes retail sales projections, excluding vehicle sales, based on spending data from the MasterCard payments network. It also uses spending surveys with other payment forms, including cash and check.

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