BJ's starting B2B sales division
Grant Welker
BJ's Wholesale Club headquarters in Westborough.
BJ's Wholesale Club is launching a new business-to-business sales division to offer bulk pricing, coordination of multiple truck or container orders, and special ordering and pick-up.
The move, announced last week, makes the Westborough retailer a closer competitor to office supply chains like Staples, which itself relies on sales to businesses for a large chunk of its revenue.
The new BJ's B2B sales division will apply to orders of more than $5,000. Businesses will have no cap on a 1.6-percent reward program on purchases.
Agha Iqbal Ali, the chairman and professor of the Isenberg School of Management's operations and information management department at UMass Amherst, said it's hard to know yet how the move will work for BJs, depending on how the logistics work and the volume of products it's able to sell. If volume is high enough, BJ's could take advantage of its bulk purchasing to pass along lower prices to customers, he said.
"It can be risky if the details don't work," Ali said.
BJ's, known more for its bulk supplies of food or household goods, is a rare brick-and-mortar retailer moving into the office supply realm. Online, Amazon is growing by leaps and bounds for office supplies and practically anything else, leaving more traditional retailers to have to absorb drops in sales as a result, Ali said.
BJ's, which is privately owned, has 214 stores and 132 gas stations in 16 eastern states.
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