Amazon.com Industrial & Scientific store: Another source for fasteners

By Susan Avery -- Purchasing, 4/23/2007 8:36:00 AM

The Industrial & Scientific store at Amazon.com now sells fasteners.

“Amazon.com strives to be the place where customers can find, discover and buy anything they are looking for online,” says Stephanie Mantello Ward, a spokesperson for Amazon.com in Seattle, Wash.

“To this end, we have built an Industrial & Scientific store  that provides a variety of products including metals, plastics, mechanical components and fasteners in answer to the needs of our corporate and institutional customers.”

Amazon carries more than 40,000 fasteners in its Industrial and Scientific store, and this figure is growing weekly. Fasteners are available in a broad range of sizes, and in more than 15 different types of materials from steel to brass to stainless steel to aluminum to titanium as well as plastics such as acetal, nylon, PVC and ceramic material.

“We have developed an attribute-rich search which allows customers to refine their fastener choice by fastener type, type of material, size, drive style, head style and several other attributes,” says Bill Burkland, senior product manager, Industrial & Scientific store, Amazon.com.

How does Amazon sell fasteners?

Amazon provides a platform for a number of online retailers to sell fasteners. Amazon itself, through its Tools & Hardware store, has for several years sold a variety of fasteners used in woodworking and construction applications (such as staples and nails for staplers and pneumatic nail guns). Now, with the launch of the Industrial & Scientific Store, Amazon also provides a platform for third-party merchants to make their fastener selection available to customers. Some merchants are: R.S. Hughes, Small Parts Inc. and MetalGrip.

“At Amazon, we start with the customer and work backwards, so we recognized that our existing customers were interested in purchasing fasteners from Amazon and found ways to make finding the right fastener easy and convenient,” says Ward.