Cost-efficiency and savings in supply sourcing of any business is revealed by respective procurement teams. However, identifying suppliers or products that provide your company the best value is not on the mind for all employees placing the buying orders. A reputed marketplace like Amazon has introduced the concept of catalog curation, wherein you can track your purchasing programs, with in-built custom messaging and product flagging.

Curation enables tracking and reporting on item purchases that may not meet your procurement policies, while also incorporating internal messages directly in the Amazon Business user experience. You can also tag items as ‘preferred’. Give your users the freedom to buy whatever they want, while also making the best choices for yourself. Not only does it build visibility, it also builds trust across your team that you are complying with the best practices.

How To Manage Purchasing With Catalog Curation

With the catalog curation feature, you have plenty of tools to control buy and sell transactions. Let’s take a look at some of the new ways to manage purchasing!

• You have an option of tagging items as ‘preferred’, either for specific groups or all users of the Amazon Business account. Those items marked as preferred will show up first in web search results.
• Certain product categories can be flagged if they do not meet the company’s standards and policies, or they can only be bought through a different process, or they are prohibited for purchase at work. For instance, if you want a user to perform a laptop purchase through the IT section, you can message them that the particular category may not meet your purchasing policies.
• As a measure to boost awareness, you can configure the messaging shown to a user, who is trying to make an order in a category that is designated as the one not meeting your procurement policies.
• For greater control and visibility, you can consider setting up approval workflows, depending on whether you have flagged particular categories as the ones not meeting your policies. If you enable this feature, an email is automatically sent to the approver, whenever a user is looking to purchase an item in such categories. This in turn serves as a communication line between the buyer and the approver. This helps the business to learn more about the demand of a particular item, and how it can alter the policies associated with it.

If you are looking to gain deeper insights about these categories, you can run purchase reports for Amazon Business Analytics to evaluate the data that tells the story. This sort of visibility helps in consolidating purchases, which leads to greater purchasing power. You can utilize Amazon Business to measure the improvements once you have implemented curation. For instance, you can track the difference between the purchase levels when the product is not meeting the required procurement policies, and after you have created custom messaging. You can also keep track of the consolidation in orders and pricing, as you are able to congregate similar requests towards single item SKU or a preferred supplier.