Enabling mandatory purchase orders and custom guidance in AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace now offers two additional governance capabilities. Together, these capabilities help procurement teams enforce purchase order compliance and communicate standards at the point of purchase.

• Mandatory purchase orders – Require buyers to enter a purchase order (PO) number before completing an AWS Marketplace subscription. You can configure this requirement independently for private offers and public offers or apply it selectively by pricing type.
• Custom user guidance messages – Display a configurable message to buyers to explain your organizational procurement policies, the expected purchase order format, and the consequences of noncompliance.

In this post, you will learn how to configure these two governance features. You will also learn how these features can be configured differently for selective audiences to enforce varying procurement policies across your AWS Organization.

Balancing agility with governance

AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog of third-party software, services, and data that makes it easy to find, buy, deploy, and manage software on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Organizations can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions to control who can subscribe to products, and governance teams can use Private Marketplace to curate which products are available to subscribe to for specific AWS accounts. These governance features are supported by organizational purchasing controls, procurement system integrations for Coupa and SAP Ariba procure-to-pay systems, spend reporting and usage tracking. Together, these features help organizations govern cloud software procurement at scale.

Customers can associate a purchase order number with their AWS Marketplace subscriptions at the time of subscribing, or even after purchase, prior to invoice generation. Although this has been a valuable feature for AWS customers, until the launch of Mandatory purchase orders governance teams couldn’t enforce the use of this feature. With the capabilities described in this post, governance teams can mandate the completion of the purchase order field for subscriptions in AWS Marketplace.

Prerequisites

Before implementing these features, you need:

• Access to an AWS management account with the AWSPrivateMarketplaceAdminFullAccess IAM policy attached to your user or role
• Trusted access and the Private Marketplace service-linked role enabled (see setup instructions)
• A defined purchase order policy for your organization’s AWS Marketplace subscriptions
• (Optional) Procurement policy or purchasing guidance to craft the customer messaging

How to configure mandatory purchase orders

To configure mandatory purchase orders, navigate to the Organizational procurement settings on your AWS Marketplace console and choose Configure next to Mandatory purchase order settings.

You can configure purchase order requirements independently for private offers and public offers, and selectively by pricing type, such as contract pricing with up-front payment, usage-based pricing (pay-as-you-go), monthly recurring pricing, or variable payments. For example, you might require purchase orders for all contract-based private offers while keeping usage-based public subscriptions unrestricted.

Figure 1 – Update mandatory purchase order settings in organizational procurement settings in the AWS Marketplace console.

Note, the mandatory purchase order feature doesn’t apply to serverless products on the Amazon Bedrock console.

The purchase order field is a free-text value, prominently labeled as “PO Number” in the header of the invoice.

Figure 2 – An Amazon Web Services invoice referencing a PO number.

For organizations that require stricter controls, AWS CloudTrail can provide an audit trail of AWS Marketplace subscription activity across your organization, giving governance teams traceability to follow up on discrepancies.

Create custom messaging for user guidance

Administrators can configure a custom message that appears to buyers on the procurement page in AWS Marketplace when they encounter the mandatory purchase order field. Custom messages can be tailored for different audiences within your organization. For more information, refer to the Configuring governance for complex organizations section later in this post. To add a message, navigate to Organizational procurement settings on the AWS Marketplace console and choose Add administrator message next to Procurement administrator message.

Figure 3 – A sample procurement administrator message, which will be displayed to end buyers in AWS Marketplace.

You might want to configure this message to include information such as:
• A link to your organization’s procurement policies
• The expected purchase order number format
• How to verify purchase order numbers in your procure-to-pay system
• The implications of noncompliance
• Resources for users who need assistance

How these features work together

Although you can use these two features independently, they are designed to complement each other. Making the purchase order field mandatory requires users to obtain the necessary internal approvals before subscribing, while the custom message explains what is required, why it matters, and the consequences of noncompliance. Together, procurement governance happens at the point of purchase and avoids the need for post-purchase remediation.

Enabling automated invoice reconciliation

By requiring users to complete the purchase order field, governance teams can help ensure the purchase order number appears prominently on the invoice. This facilitates the automatic reconciliation of invoices with approved purchase orders, helping to ensure timely payments. (For organizations using SAP Ariba or Coupa, AWS now supports electronic invoice delivery directly to these procure-to-pay systems, reducing manual invoice handling even further.)

Avoiding internal cross-charges

Traditionally, many organizations procure software through centrally managed agreements — one large contract, one large invoice. However, this requires that a central team then distribute the costs internally to the individual cost centers through manual cross-charging processes. Typically, finance teams analyze the invoice, determine which business units consumed which products in which quantities, and manually divide the invoice, then allocate this across multiple cost centers. This is time-consuming and error-prone.

With the mandatory purchase order feature, governance teams can permit users to subscribe directly in AWS Marketplace, reassured by the fact that those users must have a valid purchase order before they can subscribe. The purchase order typically contains all the necessary cost center information. When the AWS Marketplace invoice arrives, the correct cost center pays it directly, based on the purchase order, without the need for manual cross-charging.

The result is a shift from one large, centrally invoiced agreement that requires complex internal cost allocation to multiple smaller, correctly attributed invoices that don’t require manual intervention.

Benefits for your organization

For procurement teams, mandatory purchase orders enforce compliance at the point of purchase, ensuring every subscription has budget authorization and reducing unauthorized spending.

For finance and accounts payable teams, having a purchase order on every subscription enables automatic invoice reconciliation in procure-to-pay systems, improving oversight, ensuring that costs are correctly accounted for and reducing payment delays.

For end users, the custom messaging provides clear guidance on what is required before subscribing, helping them access approved software faster with proper authorization.

Getting started with mandatory purchase orders and custom messaging

These features are available now in the AWS Marketplace console under Organizational procurement settings. Administrators with the AWSPrivateMarketplaceAdminFullAccess IAM policy can enable mandatory purchase orders and configure custom messaging for their entire AWS organization.

For full configuration instructions, including initial setup, step-by-step procedures, and cleanup steps, refer to Configuring organizational procurement settings in the AWS Marketplace Buyer Guide.

Changes can take a few hours to take effect across your organization. You can monitor progress by choosing Change sets under Private Marketplace.

Configuring governance for complex organizations

By default, organizational procurement settings apply across your entire AWS organization. However, large organizations with diverse operational needs can tailor their mandatory purchase order settings to match their specific governance requirements using experiences.

An experience defines the governance rules, such as mandatory purchase order requirements and custom messages, that apply to a specific audience. An audience can be your entire organization, one or more organizational units, or one or more specific AWS accounts. You can create multiple experiences and assign a distinct audience to each, allowing different parts of your organization to operate under their own procurement rules.

For example, a global enterprise might require purchase orders for all subscription types in production accounts while allowing usage-based subscriptions without a purchase order in development and sandbox accounts to enable rapid experimentation.

To configure settings that apply across all accounts, use the Organizational procurement settings. To configure settings for specific audiences, configure procurement settings under a Private Marketplace experience and then associate the experience with the appropriate AWS organizational units or accounts.

To reverse these settings, return to Organizational procurement settings in your AWS Marketplace console and disable the mandatory purchase order requirement.

There are no additional costs associated with these governance features.

Conclusion

These mandatory purchase order and custom messaging features build on the existing governance capabilities in AWS Marketplace to help procurement teams extend AWS Marketplace access broadly across their organizations. Better governance supports innovation: when the right controls are in place, builders get faster access to the digital tools and services they need from third-party providers while maintaining compliance with organizational policies.

The mandatory purchase order and custom user guidance features are available now in AWS Marketplace. To configure these settings for your organization, sign into your AWS Management account, visit the AWS Marketplace console, and navigate to Organizational procurement settings. For detailed step-by-step instructions, refer to the AWS Marketplace Buyer Guide.

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