← Back to Work

02Amazon Business · Case Study

Preferred Brand Recommendation Ads

Helping business customers make faster purchasing decisions through sponsored brand recommendations integrated into the procurement workflow.

My RoleProduct Design · UX/UI · UX Research
TeamPM · Engineering · Business Stakeholders
Target UsersBusiness buyers · Procurement managers
PlatformAmazon Business Ads

01 — Context

Advertising inside enterprise procurement.

The Amazon Business Ads team improves advertising experiences for business shoppers while balancing enterprise purchasing workflows and advertiser visibility. Amazon Business is Amazon's B2B ecommerce platform — 7M+ customer accounts across 9 global markets — built to simplify complex procurement workflows and improve purchasing consistency across teams.

My impact

  • Reframed the problem space
  • Led qualitative research to uncover enterprise purchasing behaviors and pain points
  • Drove cross-functional alignment and execution

02 — The Opportunity

Preferred brands worked — but almost nobody used them.

~10%
of 2M active policies were associated with preferred brand rules
2.6×
higher reorder sales for preferred brand products vs. non-preferred

Setting up a Preferred Brand policy was the bottleneck: admins relied heavily on prior experience and manually searched brands one by one, with no proactive recommendations.

Preferred Brand policy setup — admins manually searching brands one by one

03 — The Hypothesis

Sponsored brand recommendations

Could help buyers discover relevant brands more efficiently — and increase preferred brand adoption during procurement setup.

But the initial assumption raised open questions we couldn't answer yet:

→How do managers choose a preferred brand? →What decision signals matter most? →Are consumer ad patterns transferable to B2B procurement?

04 — Research

Ten business buyer interviews, three themes.

Theme 01 — Decision authority Who decides preferred brands?

Individual buyers, procurement managers, and often multiple stakeholders at once.

Theme 02 — Brand evaluation How are brands selected?

Prior experience, organizational guidance, and vendor reputation.

Theme 03 — Information needs What information is missing?

Business-specific attributes, procurement fit, reliability and support.

I usually know the brands I'm looking for, but discovering new ones is difficult.
I have to search brands one by one and open multiple tabs just to compare them.
Things like certifications and compliance matter more than a brand slogan.
Sometimes I want to prefer a product category, not the entire brand.

Key insight

Business buyers needed better guidance, richer business context, and faster ways to evaluate brands during policy setup.

05 — Proposal 1.0

A rich brand recommendation experience.

The first proposal prioritized decision confidence: surface business-relevant brand signals in one place, reduce the need to compare brands across multiple tabs, and help buyers evaluate brands with greater confidence.

Proposal 1.0 — rich brand recommendation experience with detailed brand cards

06 — Going Deeper

The open question

Business customers need more information — but which signals actually drive purchasing decisions?

To answer it, I ran a competitor analysis of B2B platforms (Alibaba, Global Sources) to understand how they help buyers evaluate suppliers, and a MaxDiff survey to rank which brand attributes buyers value most. The winners: product categories, business certifications, employee and professional reviews, a brand's top products, and brand educational videos.

Competitor analysis of Alibaba and Global Sources, paired with a MaxDiff survey ranking brand attributes

07 — Proposal 2.0

Decision-oriented brand recommendations.

The final design shifted from "rich" to "decision-oriented": surface business-relevant decision signals, enable side-by-side brand comparison, support category-level brand preferences, and reduce research effort during policy setup.

Proposal 2.0 — decision-oriented brand recommendations with side-by-side comparison

Brand Quickview

A lightweight overlay that surfaces key brand information in one place — enabling faster brand discovery and evaluation without leaving the policy setup flow.

Brand Quickview — key brand information surfaced in one overlay

08 — Early Results

Piloted with US business customers.

The experience rolled out to a limited set of Amazon Business customers in the US, measured on recommendation engagement, Brand Quickview usage, add-to-policy conversion, and preferred brand policy adoption.

210
new policies created during the pilot
32%
engaged with recommended brands
18%
explored Brand Quickview

What's next

  • Create a dedicated B2B Brand Store
  • Surface business-specific brand information
  • Better support enterprise purchasing decisions