As always with AWS products, the documentation is incredibly unhelpful. So I figured I’d write out the steps we took to go live on the marketplace.
tldr: took us about a week to go live. main value add it speeding up procurement with larger companies by tacking onto their existing AWS bill. aws takes a 3% cut for SaaS products and 20% for AMIs
A bit on why we made the decision to go live on the marketplace.
- A lot of our customers are already on AWS. They have a designated AWS budget, and it speeds up the procurement process by a few weeks if they are paying with their AWS bucks instead of onboarding a net new vendor.
- The Amazon Partner Network is incentivized to direct customers toward marketplace solutions. Especially given the push for AI products.
This doesn’t necessarily mean companies will just buy the product without ever talking to us. The sales cycle is the same. But procurement will be a few weeks faster. A few weeks here and there can really add up.
On the costs side, there are two main options:
- SaaS product. AWS charges 3% of total contract value. In this scenario, AWS is just functioning like Stripe. You’re still onboarding the customer to your own cloud services.
- AMI or Container. AWS charges 20% of total contract value. I’ve heard this is negotiable, but I haven’t tried yet.
Onto the actual steps now. The entire process took a good week with the majority of that being testing back and forth with the AWS team to make sure that when a customer signs up through AWS, they are able to create an account and successfully login in to the platform (about a 24 hour turnaround with any changes you need to make for them to test again).
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This is where you’ll want to go to get started: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/partners/management-tour. Register for an AWS Marketplace account. You’ll be asked for your legal business name and five other questions answered via checkboxes/dropdowns. Click the Register & Sign into Management Portal.
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Once you’re on the AWS Marketplace Management Portal, you’ll click on the Settings tab (should be automatically redirected here).
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Set up a public profile for your company by clicking Add public profile. Super simple - this includes adding a company, name, description, website and logo.
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Afterwards, you’ll be redirected back to the Settings tab. You’ll click on the Payment information tab halfway on the page.