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.

A seamstress works while smiling
A seamstress works while smiling
A seamstress works while smiling
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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
Gender Equity
Fair Wages
Freely Chosen Employment
Environmental Protection
Grievance Mechanisms
Supply Chain Commitments
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.
Supply Chain Commitments
Gender Equity
Gender equity is a fundamental human right and a necessary foundation of a sustainable supply chain. Quality jobs for women translate into positive impacts for communities. We strive to engage with more women-owned businesses throughout our supply chains and to support women in making their own decisions on health, finances, and career development.
Supply Chain Commitments
Fair Wages
Ensuring workers receive fair pay remains a global, cross-industry issue. We work closely with suppliers, business partners, and multi-stakeholder associations to monitor and promote continual improvement in working conditions, including fair and on-time payment of wages. Our suppliers are required to pay legally required compensation, including overtime and benefits, and we encourage them to continually evaluate whether their workers earn enough to meet their basic needs and the needs of their families.
Supply Chain Commitments
Responsible Recruitment and Freely Chosen Employment
Amazon does not tolerate the use of forced labor. We partner with external organizations on holistic approaches to combating forced labor and ensuring 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.
Supply Chain Commitments
Environmental Protection
We’re committed to sourcing products and services that do not cause unnecessary environmental harm, and work with industry experts on ways to understand the environmental impact of our products.
Supply Chain Commitments
Access to Effective Grievance Mechanisms
We strive to give people opportunities to voice their concerns in a safe and confidential manner. We connect suppliers and service providers with various trusted tools, products, and systems to hear directly from their workers about their experiences and support the resolution of issues from workers’ perspectives.
Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by climate change, yet they are 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.

Amazon is providing $3 million in funding as a founding partner of the CGEF, which will provide grants for businesses, non-governmental organizations, accelerators, incubators, and grassroots organizations working to advance women-led and gender-responsive climate solutions. CGEF will also fund efforts to help women access the networks and technical skills they need to accelerate the development of their climate change technologies.

Additionally, 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.
Supply Chain Standards

Amazon’s 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.

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

Aligning Selling Partners With Our Standards
Selling partners are retail vendors and third-party sellers that sell products and services in Amazon’s stores. Our Supply Chain Standards apply to every product and service provided to Amazon 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 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 Amazon’s Supply Chain Standards. We reserve the right to remove products that don’t meet those standards from our stores.
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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.

Our supplier list and interactive supply chain map provide details on suppliers of Amazon-branded apparel, consumer electronics, food and beverage, and home goods products. We update our supply chain map at least annually to provide customers and external stakeholders visibility into where we source. We also contribute our supplier list to the Open Supply Hub to foster brand collaboration and action in the industry.

The map shows facilities producing Amazon-branded products. This list was last comprehensively updated in July 2023 and is subject to change, with partial updates provided on a periodic basis, and may not capture suppliers of all products currently being sold.

Supplier Assessment and Performance

We assess suppliers of Amazon-branded products during onboarding and periodically thereafter to understand social and environmental performance. Assessments cover four categories: Labor, Health and Safety, Environment, and Ethics. These categories include subcategories such as nondiscrimination, emergency preparedness, hazardous substances, and transparency.

Our Progress
5,592 Supplier Assessments
We performed 5,592 supplier assessments of Amazon-branded products in 2022.

Assessment findings are flagged as high, medium, or low depending on severity. Amazon makes remediation of high-level findings a condition of continued business with suppliers. Where medium-level issues are identified, we deploy verification audits to see whether suppliers have made meaningful progress toward remediation within a defined timeline. For low-level issues, we monitor suppliers for continual improvement.

See our latest supplier assessment data in our 2022 Sustainability Report.

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.

Supply Chain Partnerships

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

  • Amader Kotha Logo
  • Amfori logo
  • Better Buying Institute logo
  • Better Cotton logo
  • Business for Social Responsibility (BSR)
  • BSR HERproject logo
  • Catalyst Management Services logo
  • International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) Advisors logo
  • Issara Institute logo
  • Nest logo
  • Open Apparel Registry (OAR) logo
  • PATH logo
  • Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA) logo
  • Resilience Fund for Women in Global Value Chains logo
  • Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) logo
  • Responsible Labor Initiative (RLI) logo
  • Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) logo
  • Responsible Sourcing Network logo
  • Sedex member logo
  • StolenYouth logo with prevent, connect, empower tagline.
  • Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) logo
  • SCORE logo
  • Swasti
  • Tech Against Trafficking logo
  • The Centre for Child Rights and Business logo
  • The Climate Resolute Coalition
  • The Copper Mark
  • Thorn logo
  • Truckers Against Trafficking (TAT) logo
  • Ulala
  • USAID - Just Energy Transition (JET) Minerals Grand Challenge
Related Downloads
Read the Latest Sustainability News
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Download Our Report
2022 Sustainability Report
PDF, 7MB