Due Diligence and Ongoing Monitoring

I am curious if many companies are using an Amazon Business account?  Pros & Cons?  I looked into this 2 years ago and some concerns I had are listed below.  

1. Amazon won't commit to pricing.  The platform they use changes the prices throughout the day on the website.  Same item will change throughout the day.
2. No reps to call, run reports, business reviews.  No point of contact with someone familiar with your account.
3. Annual fees -- >$10,000 for enterprise companies
4. Only credit card (P-card) purchases. No monthly consolidated invoice.
5. No purchase orders.
6. No annual rebates based on spend volume.
7. They cannot help with policy compliance.
8. You can buy anything on their website.  There is no core list to drive standardization or control spend. This can create a big problem trying to watch expenses and products that can be purchased.
9. Returns are often handled with a credit for the item.  Most of the time they tell you to keep the item and won't pick it up as a return. How to prevent fraud if a person orders on their credit card, gets reimbursed and then returns it?
10. B2B model is lacking for mid to large companies.
11. Price increases can occur without justification or manufacturer letters.

Just curious how other companies are or aren't using Amazon.  

Thanks in advance for your responses.

I had to "Like" the research you did and shared. 

Amazon isn't AWS and therefore many efficiencies and accountabilities in AWS (cyber security, benchmarking, billing alerts, logging, audit trails, interaction with ticketing systems, serverless, etc.) doesn't make its way into offers by Amazon.

And the key word is "offers" -- Amazon Business is a Marketing appeal to attract those small business owners that aggressively use Amazon (i.e., first choice before considering vendor or retail option) personally to do the same for their business and who may frankly not have your same concerns due to the few that have access to the business account, etc. 

Now I'm curious if Marketing will have a Amazon Business Premier that provides those features you seek. 

Thanks again for the list.  It's a good lesson to share when speaking to business unit managers about how opting into a SaaS offering doesn't mean the business unit lead isn't even more accountable since the "Shadow IT" behind has not of the support infrastructure that enterprise IT, Finance, and Cyber Risk provides. 

All the best, Larry

I work for a credit union and am currently managing the Amazon Business account for our institution.  I have had a different experience than you mention here and am willing to discuss with you by phone or email if you'd like to share your contact information.  Thanks!