Automation with AWS Marketplace APIs

“AWS Partner Experience Transformation” is a blog series on updates to the AWS Partner Programs, AWS Marketplace, and AWS Partner Central.”

AWS Marketplace provides opportunities for AWS Partners to sell their offerings, expand reach, accelerate deal closure, and let customers transact the way they prefer to buy.

Today, we are introducing new AWS Marketplace APIs and a Salesforce connector. This will make it easier for sellers to perform AWS Marketplace transactions within their current operations with little to no duplicate efforts. This makes AWS Marketplace part of the existing sales cycle without having to switch between AWS Marketplace and other applications.

About the AWS Marketplace APIs

With this launch, we added new API operations to the AWS Marketplace Catalog APIs and launched new Agreements APIs for sellers.

AWS Marketplace Catalog API: The AWS Marketplace Catalog APIs provide an API interface to manage AWS Marketplace for your AWS organization or AWS account. They can be used to create, update, view, or filter products, offers, and resale authorizations.

Product API operations: Provide the ability to create products, update product detail information, and release products for publishing. These API operations let you update product details including dimensions, Regions, delivery options, and instance types.
Offer API operations: Provide the ability to create, publish, and control the availability of private or public offers. This includes the ability to create an offer and update information such as support terms, pricing terms (including flexible payment scheduler), legal terms, availability, payment schedule, and renewal terms.
Resale authorization API operations: Provide the ability for an AWS Marketplace seller to authorize a channel partner to resell their product. These API operations let you create, update and release a resale authorization. When creating a resale authorization with these API operations, you can include buyer targeting terms, legal terms, pricing terms, and payment schedule terms.
Channel Partner Private Offer (CPPO) API operations: Provide the ability for channel partners to create, update, and publish a CPPO, including updating targeting, legal terms, availability, pricing terms, and payment schedule terms.

AWS Marketplace Agreements API: The AWS Marketplace Agreements API lets you list, search, filter agreements, and view details about terms, pricing, renewals, entitlements, or invoices.

Describe Agreements operations: Provide details about an agreement, such as the seller, buyer, start date, and end date.
Search Agreements operations: Retrieve basic agreement information such as agreement type, product ID, start date, and end date.
Get Agreements terms operations: Retrieve detail about the terms in an agreement, such as offer detail, financial details, dimensions, pricing, payment schedule, and terms.

Where to use the AWS Marketplace APIs

Check out some example use cases of where you can use the AWS Marketplace APIs to simplify your product and offer creation experience.

Streamline operations: Make it easier for sales and operations teams to complete AWS Marketplace transactions by integrating the selling experience into your existing applications and workflows. This lets your sales and operations team create AWS Marketplace offers when it makes sense for customers.
Automate and scale transactions: Reduce the time needed to create an offer by developing an offer or resale authorization template to pre-populate certain fields.
Integrate reporting: Create customized dashboard views of AWS Marketplace product, offer, resale authorization, and agreement data. For example, use the APIs to create a dashboard view of all available resale authorizations or a view of all upcoming expiring agreements.
Customized notification experience: Receive Amazon EventBridge notifications for events such as private offer published, agreement cancellation, renewals, and notifications to progress internal activities. For example, using the private offer published notification, AWS Marketplace sellers can update deal status within a sales management tool from “Open” to “Closed-Won” leveraging Amazon EventBridge notifications.

How AWS Partners are using the AWS Marketplace APIs

Red Hat’s internal quoting tool

Red Hat is an AWS Marketplace API launch partner and leading provider of enterprise open-source solutions, including high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat developed an internal quoting tool using the AWS Marketplace Catalog APIs to reduce efforts around scraping data from AWS Marketplace.

Before the AWS Marketplace APIs, Red Hat scraped the AWS Marketplace user interface for pricing data for more than 400 instance types of their RHEL and OpenShift listings for every private offer.

With the internal quoting tool Red Hat developed using the AWS Marketplace APIs, they were able to remove the need for AWS Marketplace scraping and have added functionality. This included a dashboard view of offers, approval workflows, and internal quoting capabilities.

Let’s walk through some of the capabilities of Red Hat’s integration:

Offer Dashboard

The dashboard has all the private offer requests with the status of each deal. This provides visibility to sales teams which offers are requested, approved, declined offer created, or closed.

Dashboard view of all Red Hat offer status’

Workflows based on role

Based on role, there are different workflows within Red Hat’s internal quoting tool so transactions are seamlessly created for customers.

For sales teams, the dashboard shows the status of deals currently in progress and lets sellers create new deals to be approved. Sellers are able to build a quote from the available products and pricing details from AWS Marketplace. Red Hat sellers receive the product and pricing details from AWS Marketplace to calculate a price for customers. Once complete, the offer is sent to the approver to review.

View of internal quoting tool for Red Hat sellers

For approvers, the dashboard shows deals submitted by sales, deal status, and lets them approve deals created by sellers. The approver can review the offer details for accuracy. This view lets approvers review, update, and approve (or reject) a private offer request.

Red Hat- Approver View View of tool for Red Hat approvers

Finally, the offer is sent to customers. The entire offer creation process is completed within Red Hat’s internal quoting tool using the AWS Marketplace APIs. This makes it easier for sales and operations teams to complete AWS Marketplace transactions.

Deloitte’s simplification of listing products and services

As a global system integrator, and one of the largest professional services firms in the world, Deloitte was looking for a way to accelerate the process of listing offerings and transacting on those through the AWS Marketplace. With a network of multiple entities worldwide, Deloitte needs to manage multiple AWS Seller Accounts for the AWS Marketplace to transact in different regions.

To organize and scale the listing and offer creation, Deloitte is building an integrated Marketplace Hub solution that serves as the single source of truth to manage the multiple AWS Seller Accounts for AWS Marketplace.

Dashboard for creating listings, reviewing listings, and creating offers

This AWS Marketplace Integration hub offers key capabilities including onboarding and workflow approval for seller accounts, user management and access control, management of product listings, private offers & CPPO, dashboard & analytics as well as support for payment reconciliation.

This integration provides Deloitte with data-driven insights and helps reduce manual efforts by creating products and service listings across multiple AWS Seller Accounts, creating a more intuitive user experience.

Deloitte - CPPO View

Views of CPPO submission

Check out other partners harnessing the power of the AWS Marketplace APIs:

Get Started

To start building your application with the AWS Marketplace APIs, check out the AWS Marketplace Seller Guide for documentation and GitHub for sample code.

Simplifying your AWS Marketplace Integration

We also launched a new module to the AWS Partner CRM connector that lets you create, update, and manage products, offers, resale authorizations, and agreements through Salesforce. Currently, the new module supports SaaS, AMI, and container based product types. The AWS Partner CRM lets you use the power of the AWS Marketplace APIs to integrate with your Salesforce instance, without the development effort to build and maintain customer code.

Features available with the AWS Marketplace APIs are also available for the AWS Partner CRM connector including: Flexible payment scheduler which enhances private offers by enabling sellers to offer custom payment schedules to their customers on invoice terms.

AWS Partner CRM connector lets sellers use their existing processes and platform to send offers to AWS Marketplace buyers. This presents provides a better overall experience for your sales and operations teams, avoiding duplication efforts in recreating the same offer in a seller’s Salesforce environment.

View of AWS Partner CRM Connector in Salesforce AppExchange

Get started

To get started with the AWS Partner CRM connector, you can download this free package from the Salesforce App Exchange. The ACE CRM Integration and AWS Marketplace Integration are both packaged within the AWS Partner CRM Connector.