AWS Marketplace

Empowering AWS Marketplace Sellers to Streamline Operations with New Features Announced in 2024

AWS Marketplace sellers have a golden opportunity to unlock new growth avenues and streamline operations through the cutting-edge features released in 2024. These innovative enhancements empower sellers to elevate their offerings, optimize processes, and deliver unparalleled value to customers. Embrace the future and stay ahead of the curve by leveraging these game-changing tools to propel your business to new heights. In this post, we provide a breakdown of these features, including descriptions, why they’re important, what they mean to AWS Marketplace sellers, and links to relevant blog posts, guides, and resources.

AWS Marketplace has rolled out new features in 2024 that present exciting prospects for sellers to expand and refine their operations. These innovations empower sellers to enhance their offerings, increase efficiency, and provide greater value to customers. Leveraging these advanced tools can drive business growth and maintain a competitive edge. This post delves into these features, their importance, their implications for sellers, and includes relevant resources.

Simplify software discovery and purchases: Buy with AWS
In December 2024, AWS Marketplace introduced Buy with AWS, a feature that bridges AWS Partner websites with AWS Marketplace functionality. Sellers can use this feature to integrate AWS Marketplace buying experiences directly on their websites, opening new avenues to engage visitors and streamline sales. For customers, it simplifies software discovery and purchasing across partner sites using their existing AWS accounts. All Buy with AWS purchases are securely managed within AWS Marketplace.

What this means for AWS Partners selling through AWS Marketplace: Buy with AWS transforms how you engage customers on your website. You can now integrate a curated list of AWS Marketplace products directly onto your site, enabling seamless discovery and procurement. Visitors can subscribe to free trials, make purchases, and access custom pricing in a single step with Buy with AWS buttons, accelerating the path to purchase with a streamlined, co-branded buying experience. You can track conversion performance using key metrics and manage listings without additional effort, taking advantage of existing AWS Marketplace processes. Ultimately, you can use Buy with AWS to power your own websites using the AWS Marketplace catalog, transforming the customer journey directly on your website.

What’s New post | Buy with AWS blog post | Seller page | Buyer page | Seller Guide | Buyer Guide | Partner how-to video

Improved account linking experience across AWS Marketplace and AWS Partner Central
In November 2024, AWS announced an improved account linking experience for AWS Partners, connecting AWS Marketplace accounts with AWS Partner Central. This enhancement enables seamless navigation between the two platforms using single sign-on, connects Partner Central solutions to AWS Marketplace listings, links private offers to opportunities for deal tracking, and provides access to AWS Marketplace insights within the Analytics and Insights Dashboard. It also unlocks valuable AWS Partner Network (APN) program benefits such as AWS ISV Accelerate and accelerated sales cycles.

What this means for partners: The new experience introduces three key improvements to streamline the self-guided linking workflow. First, it simplifies AWS Marketplace account association through legal business name registration. Second, it automates the creation and bulk assignment of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to AWS Partner Central users, eliminating the need for manual creation in the IAM console. Lastly, it introduces three new AWS managed policies offering fine-grained access options for Partner Central and AWS Marketplace, ranging from full access to personalized access for co-sell or AWS Marketplace offer management. These changes bring the two services closer together, creating a single pane of glass to manage your end-to-end AWS Partner experience.

What’s New post | AWS Partner Network Blog post | Seller Guide | Account linking demo video

Enhanced product discovery and evaluation in AWS Marketplace
In 2024, AWS Marketplace introduced a refreshed product detail page experience, providing a unified interface across product types through a modern design and content improvements. Building on this foundation, AWS also launched AI-powered product summary and comparisons and enabled self-service promotional media capabilities for sellers. These enhancements collectively provide richer information to customers and simplify their path from discovery to purchase in AWS Marketplace.

What this means for partners: The refreshed product data page experience offers you new opportunities to showcase your products effectively. The updated design focuses on rich media, prominent badging, and a dedicated features and programs section, improving your product’s visibility and engagement. With the new self-service promotional media feature, you can quickly add, update, and remove videos and images on your product data pages, enabling more dynamic presentations and reducing time to market for new content. For your customers, the new product data page provides a streamlined product discovery and evaluation process. They benefit from AI-powered product summaries and comparisons, which helps them make faster, more informed purchasing decisions.

Self-service media What’s New post | Product summary and comparison What’s New post | Optimize products for search | Seller Guide | Maximize listing potential re:Invent session

Financing made easy: New purchasing option in AWS Marketplace
In November 2024, AWS announced the AWS Marketplace financing program in partnership with PNC Bank. This new financing program supported by PNC Vendor Finance is inherently available in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console for select AWS Marketplace customers in the US, excluding Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Vermont.

What this means for partners: Customer financing has traditionally been a manual process that occurs outside of the AWS Management Console. Partners often experience delays in the procurement cycle and, in some cases, lost deals due to a lack of financial flexibility. With AWS Marketplace financing, partners can offer another option to their customers to pay for their solution over time while being paid in full at deal closure. Eligible US customers can receive fast financing decisions, in near real time for up to $350,000 and typically within 2 business days for higher amounts, reducing procurement delays and accelerating deal closures.

What’s New post | AWS financing

Streamlined agreements management, offer cloning, and export to PDF
In November 2024, AWS Marketplace introduced an enhanced agreement management experience and new private offer features for sellers in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal. This update provides a unified view of all agreements, introduces offer cloning capabilities, and enables PDF export of offer and agreement details.

What this means for partners: Sellers can now access a centralized view for all current and past agreements with improved status visibility, filtering, and saved searches. The new split panel view displays related agreements for the same buyer, helping you prepare for customer engagements and identify renewal or expansion opportunities. The relationship between agreements and offers is now clearly visible in both the Offers and Agreements sections of AWS Marketplace Management Portal. You can clone past direct private offers, expediting creation of similar deals or revisions. Finally, you can now export offer and agreement details to PDF, simplifying information sharing and reducing operational burden. These improvements aim to streamline the management of agreements and accelerate the creation of new offers.

What’s New post | Agreements overview | Cloning offers | Export offer to PDF

Introducing local currency private offers and local bank account support
In October 2024, AWS Marketplace announced support for sellers and channel partners to create contract pricing private offers in four new currencies and choose bank accounts not domiciled in the US for disbursement. These features make it easier for sellers and buyers to do business globally by simplifying funds flow.

What this means for partners: Sellers can now create private offers with contract pricing in EUR, GBP, JPY, and AUD and receive their disbursements in the offer currency. Additionally, sellers are no longer required to have a US-domiciled bank account. Instead, they can choose to receive payments into one or more bank accounts located in any seller eligible jurisdiction. For Channel Partner Private Offers (CPPOs), the seller, channel partner, and buyer must all transact in the same currency. Sellers need to issue a resale authorization in the negotiated currency, and the channel partner then creates the CPPO in that currency.

What’s New post | Cheat sheet for sellers | Cheat sheet for buyers | Seller Guide

Enhanced private offer experience: Save your offers in draft, generate payment schedules, and more
In May 2024, AWS Marketplace upgraded the private offer creation experience for sellers, making it easier for you to extend custom pricing and terms to your customers. The new interface provides step-by-step guidance, allows saving drafts, enables bulk pricing for multiple dimensions, and simplifies payment schedule generation.

What this means for partners: Sellers can now work on draft private offers over multiple sessions using the new save and resume function, so you can gather information and modify the contents before submitting an offer. The new bulk apply feature allows setting a single price and quantity for all product dimensions, with flexibility for individual adjustments, reducing repetitive inputs. The enhanced payment schedule generator simplifies complex configurations, especially for multi-year contracts, enabling quick setup of common payment structures. Detailed guidance is available at each step to help you make informed decisions. These improvements save you time when creating your private offer, increasing your sales velocity through AWS Marketplace.

What’s New post | New guides | New experience video | Seller Guide

Simplified tax management: Access documents directly in AWS Marketplace
In February 2024, AWS Marketplace launched the tax documents feature in AWS Marketplace Management Portal, making tax documents available for sellers such as independent software vendors (ISVs), consulting partners, and channel partners. Using this feature, customers can access and download their 1099-K forms and DAC7 reports for their tax year, if available. Sellers can use the managed policy AWSMarketplaceSellerFullAccess or attach the permission tax:GetTaxInfoReportingDocument to provide their users with access to the tax documents.

What this means for partners: Previously, AWS Marketplace sellers had to access their tax forms in Amazon Tax Central. Tax Central required our partners to register for a Tax Central account using their retail Amazon.com account. With this launch, AWS Marketplace sellers can now access the documents in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal without having to maintain a separate Tax Central account.

What’s New post | Seller Guide

Future-proof your SaaS deals with future dated agreements
In January 2024, AWS Marketplace the announced general availability of future dated agreements (FDAs). AWS customers can now prebook purchases and set up renewals in AWS Marketplace using the FDA feature. With this feature, AWS Marketplace sellers can specify a future start date as part of the SaaS private offer creation process. When an offer is accepted, a FDA is created, where the customer’s entitlement (or ability to use the product) starts at the specified future start date.

What this means for partners: FDAs give customers and sellers better control over how they book deals. It provides flexibility for independently managing when deals are booked, when invoices are scheduled, and when the products will be used. With the streamlining of these three aspects of a purchase, buyers and sellers can significantly reduce procurement time and operational burden in using AWS Marketplace.

What’s New post| Buyer Guide | Seller Guide | Creating FDA video | AWS Marketplace features blog post

Conclusion and next steps
In this post, we highlighted nine new features released in 2024 AWS Marketplace that sellers can use to increase visibility and time to market for your buyers. To find out about new features as they are released, you can sign up for the AWS Marketplace Channel Seller Newsletter and follow the AWS Marketplace What’s New site.

About the Authors

James is a Partner Enablement Manager delivering specialized enablement that helps empower AWS Consulting Partners and their customers build, grow, and scale their business with AWS Marketplace and as an AWS Partner Network (APN) partner. In his spare time, you can find James spending time with his wife and daughter, enjoying outdoor activities, or training his bird hunting dogs.

 

 

Raju is a Tech Business Developer driving go-to-market and adoption strategies for AWS Marketplace features that help customers grow their business on AWS. In his free time, you can find him exploring hiking trails with his wife, entertaining their toddlers, and rediscovering the world through their curious eyes.