Amazon’s Rise Fills Small Business Needs

Steve O'Connor2019 Trends, Business Operations, Small Business Trends, Technology, Uncategorized2 Comments

A woman on a laptop working in a modern office space.

Amazon is not only shaping how people shop online — more than 75 percent of US online consumers shop on Amazon most of the time — the retail goliath is changing how business owners supply their offices.

Finding the right office space requires a great deal of work and effort: from weighing all the pros and cons of a location to nailing down a lease agreement that will both leave room for your company to grow and not drown your business with overhead. Of course, if you’ve opted out of pursuing a shared office space, there’s a lot of shopping to be done before your team can get to work.

Thankfully, as a business owner, you no longer have to spend countless days comparing prices between stores. In today’s fast-paced business world, you don’t have time for that — and Amazon gets that. The online retailer has managed to take a dominant lead as a central hub for business needs: from desks and coffee to high-end electronics and business services, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon Web Service hosting.

What You Need for a New Office

It can be overwhelming to think about all the stuff you’ll need for a new office, from the essentials for doing your job to creature comforts and client courtesies.

When breaking down what you need to buy for your office, it can help to consider the situation from room to room. First, decide what your office area needs, then see what the conference room and lobby need. However, don’t forget about auxiliary rooms, such as what’s needed for the kitchen, breakroom, and bathroom.

What might not be intuitive is that the first things you’ll want to actually purchase are not those items essential to work, such as computers and monitors. Instead, the first items you need to buy are those that ensure your business complies with code and local laws. This could include first-aid kits and fire extinguishers.

Once you’ve added those items to your Amazon cart, you can start focusing on the absolute essentials, which for most startups include computers, monitors, network routers, surge protectors, backup drives, and some sort of Uninterruptible Power Supply.

If you already have a core team ready to go, don’t hesitate to include their preferences, especially when it comes to furniture. What kinds of chairs do they work best in? Or, do they prefer standing workstations? This is the moment to craft an office that will best serve you and your entire team — so take the time to do it right.

Thankfully, the time required to successfully stock your office isn’t what it was before Amazon blew open the online retail market. You don’t have to call around to find the best price for all these items; you can simply add them to your shopping cart and then sort through them at the end of the day to make sure you have everything you need.

Also, don’t forget to take advantage of Amazon’s “business-only price savings.”

Amazon Services for Businesses

Amazon — constantly expanding — offers more to a business that just a one-stop shop for office supplies and furniture. It also caters to small business owners with services such as MTurk and web hosting.

MTurk is a crowdsourcing marketplace that will allow you to more easily outsource certain virtual tasks, from conducting simple data validation to content moderation.

Though it’s very likely you’ll already have a web hosting service on your payroll before you start settling into an office, it’s certainly worth reviewing the benefits of Amazon’s cloud web hosting.

Final Thoughts: Amazon’s Rise Fills Small Business Needs

Though it can be overwhelming to set up your office space once you’ve signed a lease, at least it’s not as daunting of a task as it was only a decade ago. As Amazon grew, small business owners’ needs were identified as a market the company could satisfy. And, in that very Jeff Bezos way, satisfy and dominate the market is exactly what Amazon did.

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