Amazon reported 716.9 billion dollars of net sales in 2025 and took the number one position on the Fortune Global 500, displacing Walmart for the first time. At the end of the second quarter of 2026 it employed 1,595,000 people. In the first half of 2026 alone it spent 98.4 billion dollars on property and equipment and booked 62.7 billion dollars of technology and infrastructure expense.
Those numbers are why enterprise vendors target Amazon. They are also why most of them get it wrong, starting with the name of the thing they are trying to do.
Three different things are called selling to Amazon
- Supplying consumer products to Amazon Retail as a first-party vendor, through Vendor Central. Amazon buys wholesale and resells.
- Selling your own products on the marketplace as a third-party seller, through Seller Central. Third-party sellers accounted for 61 percent of paid units in the second quarter of 2026.
- Selling software, services, hardware, logistics, construction or professional services to Amazon.com, Inc. as a corporate buyer.
This page is about the third. Search intent is dominated by the first two, which is why almost everything published under this phrase concerns listings, buy box and fulfilment fees, and why none of it helps if your deal is a seven-figure platform contract.
A fourth motion gets confused with all of them. Listing on AWS Marketplace or joining the AWS Partner Network is selling with Amazon to Amazon's customers. It is a good motion, it is not this one, and doing it well gives you no procurement standing as a supplier.
How the buying process actually runs
The supplier systems that matter are entered by invitation. Amazon Supplier Central states plainly: contact your Amazon partner for an invitation. Payee Central, the tool where suppliers submit invoices, manage banking details and track payment status, is reached through an invitation email sent by your Amazon business contact. Registration forms exist, but the systems assume a relationship already does. There is no queue you can join and no portal you can talk your way through.
Two third-party screenings are mandatory and Amazon names the vendors. Amazon publishes that its assessment vendors are EcoVadis and Avetta, that participation is mandatory, and that refusal may affect your standing. EcoVadis scores environment, labour and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement. Avetta covers workplace safety and applies to any supplier with people physically present on Amazon property. Both cost money and weeks. Treat them as schedule items, not paperwork at the end.
Retail seasonality governs the calendar for half the company. Amazon's fourth quarter is far larger than any other: 213.4 billion dollars of net sales in the fourth quarter of 2025 against 180.2 billion in the third. Anything touching stores, fulfilment, delivery or payments gets scheduled around peak rather than through it. AWS runs on its own rhythm.
Purchases originate inside a reporting segment. Amazon reports three: North America, International and AWS. AWS alone produced 42.2 billion dollars of net sales and 16.6 billion dollars of operating income in the second quarter of 2026. Treating Amazon as one buyer with one standard is the most common structural error. AWS and Worldwide Amazon Stores buy differently, on different clocks.
Who owns what, so you know where your deal belongs
You will not be selling to these people. Knowing their remit tells you which part of Amazon your deal sits in, and whose priorities it has to survive two or three levels down.
| Name | Role | What it means for a vendor |
|---|---|---|
| Matt Garman | CEO, Amazon Web Services | Cloud, silicon and AI platform decisions sit inside AWS and are largely self-contained |
| Doug Herrington | CEO, Worldwide Amazon Stores | Retail, grocery, advertising-adjacent and selling partner systems |
| Udit Madan | SVP, Worldwide Operations | Fulfilment, transportation, robotics and anything with a physical footprint |
| Steve Schmidt | Chief Security Officer | Security review is a company-level function, not a per-deal formality |
| Brian Olsavsky | SVP and CFO | Where a large multi-year commitment eventually has to justify itself |
Note what is absent. Amazon's published S-team runs to 27 people and contains no Chief Information Officer and no chief procurement officer. Beth Galetti leads People eXperience and Technology and Andy Jassy is President and CEO. There is no single technology buyer to find, because Amazon has not created one.
Names taken from Amazon's own S-team page and investor relations disclosures, verified 12 September 2026. Senior roles change. Verify at source before using any name.
You cannot sell into this account from the bottom
A deal that justifies the cost of an enterprise sales motion here runs to millions a year, far more for infrastructure across a multi-year term. Amazon publishes frugality as a leadership principle and behaves accordingly. Nobody in the middle of the organisation approves that number. In a company where segment CEOs run businesses larger than most of the Fortune 500, the approval you need sits at or immediately below segment leadership.
This is where outbound goes wrong. It aims where replies are easiest, which is where the authority is not.
The layer that matters is below the public names, and Amazon is the hardest version of this problem
At most Global 500 companies the sponsor layer is thin and stable. At Amazon it is neither, by design.
AWS publishes the doctrine itself: Amazon organises into two-pizza teams, ideally fewer than ten people, each with single-threaded ownership of one service, headed by a single-threaded leader whose job is to remove obstacles rather than act as an approval gate. When demand grows, the team splits into more two-pizza teams rather than growing. The number of owners therefore increases continuously and the map is out of date the moment you draw it.
For a seller this cuts both ways. The person who can sponsor your product is unusually junior in title and unusually empowered in practice, which is good. They almost never appear on a leadership page, which is not.
Then there is the build problem, more acute here than anywhere. Your competitor is rarely another vendor. It is an internal team that believes it can ship this. Amazon designs its own silicon, Graviton and Trainium, its own models and its own developer tooling, and in 2026 committed a billion dollars to AWS Forward Deployed Engineering so its engineers embed with customers. If your category overlaps anything AWS sells, you are asking a company to buy something it competes with. That objection is raised in a room you are not in, and cold outreach gives you no way to answer it. A warm referral gets you into the room where it is argued.
The board is a published second-degree map
Amazon's directors hold named positions elsewhere. As of September 2026 the board has twelve members. Read this as a seller rather than as trivia.
- Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder and Executive Chair of Amazon; owner of The Washington Post; founder of Blue Origin; co-founder and co-CEO of Project Prometheus.
- Andrew R. Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon.
- Wendell P. Weeks, current Chairman, CEO and President of Corning Incorporated.
- Indra K. Nooyi, formerly Chair and CEO of PepsiCo; current director of Honeywell International and Royal Philips.
- Brad D. Smith, President of Marshall University; current director of JPMorgan Chase; formerly CEO and Executive Chairman of Intuit.
- Edith W. Cooper, co-founder of Medley Living; current director of PepsiCo; formerly EVP and global head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs.
- Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; current director of Corning Incorporated.
- Andrew Y. Ng, Managing General Partner of AI Fund; founder of DeepLearning.AI; Executive Chairman of LandingAI; Chairman and co-founder of Coursera; formerly Chief Scientist at Baidu.
- Jamie S. Gorelick, Lead Independent Director of Amazon and Senior Counsel at WilmerHale; current director of VeriSign; formerly Deputy Attorney General of the United States.
- Jonathan J. Rubinstein, lead director of Robinhood Markets; formerly co-CEO of Bridgewater Associates, CEO of Palm, and an SVP at Apple.
- Patricia Q. Stonesifer, formerly interim CEO of The Washington Post, CEO of Martha's Table, and CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
- Kevin Mandia, elected 8 September 2026; founder and CEO of Armadin; co-founder and general partner of Ballistic Ventures; founder and former CEO of Mandiant.
If anyone in your network is senior at Corning, PepsiCo, Honeywell, Royal Philips, JPMorgan Chase, VeriSign, Robinhood, Coursera, MIT, WilmerHale or Ballistic Ventures, there is a checkable two-hop path to an Amazon director. Two of them sit on Corning's board. Almost nobody uses this map.
Other connector routes, and the one Amazon does not give you
There is no corporate alumni network to work. Amazon's published alumni page is a rehiring channel for former warehouse associates. Unlike banks of comparable size, Amazon runs no organised corporate alumni programme you can join or search. The alumni population is enormous and unstructured, so the only way to use it is to map it yourself across your own employees, investors and customers.
Acquired-company alumni are the exception. Whole Foods Market, Zoox, Ring, Twitch, One Medical, MGM and, most recently, DuckLabs all arrived with their own networks. People who worked at those firms before the deal now have former colleagues inside Amazon.
Partners and integrators already inside. Firms running large programmes at Amazon can route you to the team with the problem, and often want to, because it makes their own engagement stickier.
Your retail and cloud customers. A champion who has watched your product work is a more credible referrer than anyone on your payroll.
Working out which of those paths exists is what a relationship intelligence platform is for. At an account with 1.6 million employees, the odds that a path exists are high and the odds that anyone has looked are low.
And then you have to get to your own connector
The step that kills more introductions than the external ask does. Suppose the best route runs through one of your board members who knows an Amazon director. That is about as strong as paths get, and close to unrepeatable. You are asking someone to spend a piece of a relationship built over years, on you. Ask twice in a quarter and you will not be asked again.
The same logic applies at every level. Asking a customer champion to introduce you to a peer at Amazon is asking them to lend you their credibility. Most companies have no view of which of their own people are already asking the same connector about the same account, and it happens constantly.
Three rules for the introduction itself
Ask for the segment and the team, not the company. "An introduction to whoever owns observability tooling inside AWS infrastructure" is actionable. "An introduction to Amazon" is not, and at a company organised into thousands of single-threaded teams it is close to meaningless.
Write the paragraph your connector will forward. They will not write your pitch. Give them something they can send without editing. The forwardable blurb is the whole craft.
A warm path starts the clock, it does not skip it. You still face EcoVadis, Avetta where relevant, security review and Payee Central onboarding. What you gain is a real conversation with the single-threaded owner who has the problem, and an early hearing of the build-versus-buy argument, months earlier than otherwise. Then comes the slower work of multithreading across the team that will sign.
See the warm paths into Amazon
Everything above describes the problem: two-pizza teams that form and split faster than any account map survives. What it does not tell you is which of your own relationships already reaches inside. That is a question about your network, not theirs, and it is the one most teams answer from memory.
Boomerang maps the warm paths your company already has into accounts like Amazon, across your team, your customers, your board and investors, and your partners. It then drafts the ask, routes it through the right connector and tracks it to a booked meeting. Book a 15-minute walkthrough and see it run against your own target accounts.
Frequently asked questions
What does selling to Amazon actually mean?
Three different things. Supplying consumer products to Amazon Retail as a first-party vendor through Vendor Central, selling your own products on the marketplace as a third-party seller through Seller Central, and selling enterprise software, services or infrastructure to Amazon.com, Inc. as a corporate buyer. The first two dominate search results. Only the third is an enterprise sales motion, and advice about listings, buy box and fulfilment fees does not transfer to it.
How do you become a corporate supplier to Amazon?
The systems that matter are entered by invitation. Amazon Supplier Central tells prospective suppliers to contact their Amazon partner for an invitation, and Payee Central, where invoices and banking details are managed, is reached through an invitation email from an Amazon business contact. Amazon also requires EcoVadis sustainability screening and, for any supplier with people physically on Amazon property, Avetta safety prequalification. Amazon publishes both as mandatory.
Who makes technology buying decisions at Amazon?
Not one person. Amazon's published S-team of 27 leaders includes no Chief Information Officer and no chief procurement officer. Purchases originate inside a reporting segment, North America, International or AWS, and within those segments Amazon organises into two-pizza teams with single-threaded ownership of one service. The sponsor you need is usually the single-threaded leader of the team with the problem, and that person rarely appears on any leadership page.
Does Amazon build or buy?
It builds by default, more than almost any comparable buyer. Amazon designs its own silicon, its own models and its own developer tooling, and in 2026 committed a billion dollars to AWS Forward Deployed Engineering to embed its engineers with customers. If your category overlaps anything AWS sells, you are asking Amazon to buy something it competes with. That objection is argued in a room you are not in unless somebody trusted puts you there.
Is AWS Marketplace a way to sell to Amazon?
No. AWS Marketplace and the AWS Partner Network are ways to sell with Amazon to Amazon's customers. They are a legitimate and often excellent motion, but success there gives you no procurement standing as a supplier to Amazon.com, Inc. and does not shorten the supplier onboarding, security review or screening process.
