Amazon on Wednesday kicked off its Small Business Month, which will feature grant awards for eligible small businesses and the release of a new educational resource center for small businesses.
The initiative, which is led by Amazon Business, the tech giant's online business-to-business procurement store, is in its third year. Amazon VP Shelley Salomon told FOX Business, "I'm very excited about this. It's a great opportunity for us to give back and help the small business community."
She noted that, in addition to offering over $250,000 in grants to eligible small businesses, the company launched a new small business success studio that offers educational resources.
"This year, we've also added new immersive educational content to help them become better at what they do — either through inspirational videos from successful entrepreneurs to webinars and things that might help you figure out how to manage your cash flow or other things that are important to small business," Salomon said.
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Amazon Business' small business success studio also offers tutorials on applying for small business loans, how to optimize a website for internet searches and other topics.
"The other way that I think is super interesting is that we support small businesses in our supplier base," she added in reference to Amazon Business' procurement tools.
"As a company, you're able to look to source your products based on who the supplier is, and it could be a minority-owned business, a veteran-owned business, women-owned businesses. … As a customer of ours, we provide the ability to filter those suppliers and connect our customers with those small business operators."
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Amazon Business will be awarding over $250,000 in grants and prizes, including $25,000 in grants to the grand prize winner, $20,000 to four finalists and $15,000 to 10 semifinalists. Applications close May 24.
Small businesses with up to $1 million in annual revenue are eligible for the grant awards, which are geared toward small businesses that have had an impact in their communities.
Amazon also conducted a survey of decision-makers at small businesses to get a sense of the challenges and opportunities they see in the current economy.
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It found that the top three challenges keeping them up at night were high inflation (50%), high operations and labor costs (42%) and supply chain distribution (41%).
About half said they're worried that if they don't adopt artificial intelligence (AI), their businesses will fall behind.
Despite those challenges and concerns, 93% of small businesses said they were hopeful about the state of the economy.
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"I think people are excited about new opportunities to grow business in this climate, and so I feel like we'll see a turning point with some of our customers where there's still some concern. But, at the same time, they're looking to the future," Salomon said.
