Explore 2023 report
Sustainability

Supply chain

We seek to enable safe, equitable, fair, and sustainable supply chains across all our businesses. We build long-term relationships with suppliers that align with our values and are committed to constantly improving conditions for workers.

Our approach

Our approach to enabling a responsible supply chain is rooted in our commitment to workers and based on a model of continuous improvement. We have dedicated teams in key sourcing regions that engage directly with suppliers to communicate our standards, evaluate risks in our supply chain, and help suppliers build their capacities to provide working environments that are safe and respectful of human rights. We also work closely with strategic partners across the globe to enhance our impact.

We focus our efforts in six priority commitment areas:

Safe and healthy workplaces

Maintaining safe and healthy workplaces is one of our top priorities. We work with suppliers across the globe to increase worker awareness of safety issues. This includes promoting a culture of shared safety responsibility and developing initiatives to support worker well-being.
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Gender equity

Gender equity is a fundamental human right and a necessary foundation of a sustainable supply chain. We strive to engage with more women-owned businesses throughout our supply chains and support women in making their own decisions on health, finances, and career development.
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Fair wages

Ensuring workers receive fair pay remains a global, cross-industry issue. We monitor wage payments throughout our supply chains to inform more meaningful supplier engagements, enhance our human rights due diligence processes, and promote continuous improvement in the fair and on-time payment of wages. Our suppliers are required to pay legally required compensation, including overtime and benefits, and we support them in evaluating whether their workers earn enough to meet their basic needs and the needs of their families.
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Responsible recruitment and freely chosen employment

Amazon does not tolerate the use of child labor, forced labor, or human trafficking in any form in our operations or supply chain. We advance holistic approaches to combat forced labor and ensure vulnerable workers, especially foreign migrants, have access to transparent information on working conditions including pay, hiring practices, and contract terms. We also strive to enable worker access to remedy.
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Environmental protection

We’re committed to sourcing products and services that avoid unnecessary environmental harm, and work with industry experts to increase our understanding of the environmental challenges we face, our performance against them, and effective solutions we can implement to address them.
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Access to effective grievance mechanisms

We want our supply chain workers to have the ability to voice their concerns about the workplace in a safe and confidential manner. We connect suppliers and service providers with trusted tools, products, and systems to hear directly from their workers about their experiences and support the resolution of issues from workers' perspectives.
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Supporting gender equity in climate tech

Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by climate change, yet they’re also uniquely equipped to design climate solutions. To address the climate finance gender gap that exists for women globally, we’ve partnered with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help launch the USAID Climate Gender Equity Fund (CGEF), a new climate finance initiative designed to remove systemic market barriers that prevent women and girls from accessing climate finance.

Climate Gender Equity Fund

CGEF is awarding grants to three organizations supporting women-led climate solutions in Africa. The three organizations selected are a women-led acceleration hub in Nigeria that is scaling new climate technologies; an accelerator in South Africa that supports female science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) business founders; and an incubator in Kenya that focuses on women entrepreneurs working on climate-smart agriculture solutions.

Learn how we’re supporting women-led climate solutions  
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The Climate Pledge Fund

We’re allocating $50 million from The Climate Pledge Fund to invest directly in climate tech companies run by women, as well as incubators and accelerators that prioritize women-led entities.

Visit The Climate Pledge Fund  
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Supply Chain Standards

Our Supply Chain Standards apply to all suppliers of goods and services for Amazon and Amazon’s subsidiaries, including service providers, vendors, selling partners, contractors, and subcontractors. We update these standards at least every three years. We published our latest update in 2022, working with external stakeholders to align our requirements with current best practices and regulatory standards.

Download Supply Chain Standards  

[01]

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  • Our standards strengthen existing protections on fair wages by encouraging suppliers to assess if pay is sufficient to meet workers’ basic needs and check that suppliers offer equal pay for equal work. We also expanded expectations around supporting workers’ physical and mental health. We introduced several additional elements to our standards, including:

    • Protections for workers with disabilities
    • Pregnancy-related accommodations
    • Workers’ freedom to terminate employment without penalty
    • Legal parental leave policies
    • Responsible artificial intelligence practices
    • An environmental justice provision that encourages suppliers to assess and address environmental equity issues
  • Selling partners are retail vendors and third-party sellers that sell products and services in our stores. Our Supply Chain Standards apply to every product and service provided to us or sold in our stores. We encourage selling partners to perform human rights and environmental due diligence to help ensure products and services are produced and supplied in ways that respect human rights and the environment, and protect the fundamental dignity of workers.  We evaluate credible allegations of selling partner violations of our Supply Chain Standards.

    If we have reason to suspect products don’t meet our standards, we may request due diligence from selling partners to demonstrate products were manufactured in accordance with our Supply Chain Standards. We reserve the right to remove products that don’t meet those standards from our stores.

Supplier assessment and performance

We assess suppliers of Amazon-branded products during onboarding, and periodically thereafter, to evaluate their compliance with our Supply Chain Standards in four categories: labor rights, health and safety, environment, and ethics. These categories include subcategories such as nondiscrimination, emergency preparedness, hazardous substances, and transparency. By assessing the performance of our suppliers, we improve working conditions and strengthen the resilience of our supply chain.

Assessment findings are flagged as high, medium, or low depending on severity. When high- and medium-level issues are identified, we take steps to verify that suppliers have made meaningful progress toward remediation. For low-level issues, we monitor suppliers for continuous improvement through maintenance audits.

We performed 3,011 assessments of suppliers of Amazon-branded products in 2023.

Explore 2023 Sustainability Report
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Supply chain transparency

Supply chain transparency is an important tool to help us address risks in our supply chain and identify opportunities for collaboration on systemic supply chain issues. We contribute our supplier list to the Open Supply Hub to foster brand collaboration and action in the industry.

Our supplier list and interactive supply chain map provide details on finished product suppliers of Amazon-branded apparel, consumer electronics, food and beverage, and home goods products. Recognizing the need for further transparency beyond finished product suppliers, we have been working towards greater visibility in upstream supply chains, and have started including some apparel component suppliers in our public supply chain map.

We update our supply chain map annually to provide customers and external stakeholders visibility into where we source. This list was last reviewed in April 2024 and is subject to change, with partial updates provided on a periodic basis. Therefore, at any given time, it may not capture suppliers of all products currently being sold.

Explore map on Open Supply Hub Explore map on Open Supply Hub
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Conflict minerals

Amazon conducts due diligence on our private label and contract manufacturing product supply chains, including the potential sourcing of conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and adjoining countries. We do this because we believe it’s the right thing for customers. We expect suppliers to support our effort to identify the origin of designated minerals used in our products. Amazon’s Conflict Minerals Report is made public through our SEC filings and can be found on our Investor Relations site under Corporate Governance.
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Supply chain partnerships

Partnerships enhance our impact and help support sustainability efforts beyond our own reach. We collaborate with credible, knowledgeable, and innovative industry partners around the world who share our vision.

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  • 2023

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    Supply Chain Standards

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