Let them shop. Keep the record.
People buy from Amazon Business and their usual suppliers anyway. Atlas lets them shop on the supplier's own site at your negotiated prices and brings the basket back as an order. For Amazon Business it also reads your account there, to show everything that never came through Atlas.
They shop where they already shop. You get the record.
Press the supplier's name, land on their site already signed in and priced to your contract, fill a basket, press transfer. It comes back here with its lines intact. Nothing is ordered until you confirm it.
- WhyThe alternative is somebody buying it on a card and claiming it back. That costs more, loses the contract price, and leaves you with a receipt instead of a record
- InThe basket, line by line, with the supplier's own part numbers
- OutA purchase order the supplier can fulfil, coded to a cost centre
- NeverA basket that becomes an order without somebody here confirming it
The ceiling is the control. The approval is not.
Small baskets go straight through: pretending a box of pens needs a signature trains people to approve without reading. Larger ones need one person. Above a ceiling you set, the basket is refused and sent to a normal requisition.
- DirectAt or below your direct limit — straight to the supplier, no approval
- One approverAbove it, up to the ceiling — the shopper's head of department decides, because the price and supplier are already contracted
- RefusedAbove the ceiling — no order, and the refusal names both figures
- Why it mattersWithout a ceiling, 'no approval under a thousand' is not a rule about spending at all. It is a statement about how many baskets somebody is willing to fill in
What was bought without going through Atlas at all.
A separate connection, to Amazon Business today, reads its own record of your account and matches it against orders raised here. What does not match never came through your process — for most organisations, the number that justified buying a procurement system.
- ReadsYour own transaction history from your own supplier account
- SendsNothing. This connection only ever reads
- MatchingExact or not at all: the supplier must echo our order number back. Amount and date matching are deliberately refused — a near-match does not mislabel a row, it makes unmatched spend disappear, and that is the entire finding
- HonestA row the supplier reports without a transaction reference is skipped AND said so, because a silent drop is spend that vanishes
Four values from the supplier, and two numbers from you.
The supplier issues two web addresses, an identity and a shared secret. You set the direct limit and the ceiling. Test mode ships on, and stays on until you have completed one full round trip.
- SimpleEnter the four values and link the catalogue to a supplier record
- ThenSet both limits, in your own currency
- ThenConfirm a head of department is recorded for every team that will shop. Where none is, the basket is refused rather than falling to somebody with no basis to judge it
- Safe by defaultTest mode is ON when the connection is created. The first order a buyer places must not be an accident
A basket arrives cross-site. Here is what authenticates it.
The supplier posts the basket from the shopper's browser, so it arrives with no session of ours attached. What proves it is genuine is a high-entropy, single-use, time-limited identifier Atlas generated when the trip started.
- RefusedA reused, expired, unknown or absent identifier — all four
- ValidatedBoth supplier addresses are checked as public HTTPS endpoints before anything is sent, because Atlas posts a shared secret to whatever address the form named
- StoredThe shared secret is encrypted and never rendered back to any screen
- SentThe shopper's name and work email reach the supplier, so their site can apply your pricing. That is disclosed in the privacy policy rather than buried