AWS Marketplace is great space for software companies to sell their products to AWS account holders. In a previous post, we put SaaS and AWS Marketplace up against each other, going through their pros and cons. At N2W Software, we chose to list our cloud-native backup product, in the AWS Marketplace and it has become our key source of sales. I’d like to share some of the many advantages we’ve enjoyed after choosing to use AWS Marketplace to sell our products.
- Visibility Listing a product in the AWS Marketplace gives it great visibility among the large community of AWS users, due to AWS’ placement in the market, which is a big advantage. Additionally, AWS Marketplace’s search tool organically exposes relevant products to potential customers.
- Credibility AWS customers tend to be more confident in software vendors that are listed on AWS Marketplace. Before any product is listed in AWS Marketplace, it is scanned and reviewed by the AWS team, so customers know that they are buying AWS-approved products.
- Deployment and Billing AWS Marketplace takes care of deployment, billing and collection for software products sold as AMIs through AWS Marketplace and provides vendors with a monthly payment. Not only do vendors using AWS Marketplace avoid the hassle and costs associated with these activities, but their customers also experience a smooth and easy billing process that they are already familiar with.
- Flexible Pricing Options Products sold as AMIs through AWS Marketplace can be billed on an hourly or monthly basis, allowing software vendors to avoid the need to develop a software deployment system and billing infrastructure. While we chose the monthly billing option for Cloud Protection Manager, many other products, such as Big Data applications that create computational workloads, prefer hourly-based pricing. In these cases, customers are charged according to the type and number of instances used.
- Free Trial Companies leveraging hourly-based pricing can provide built-in free trials to their customers through AWS Marketplace instead of developing their own infrastructure for trials. Once the free trial period expires, customers are seamlessly transitioned to the paid version.
- Annual Subscriptions The annual subscription payment model is a fairly new option offered by AWS Marketplace for products sold on an hourly basis. Annual subscription is automatic, hassle-free and enables companies to offer discounts to long-term customers while receiving more revenue upfront.
- Delivery, Tracking, and Usage Reports AWS Marketplace has a mechanism to ensure that only employees of companies that are subscribed to your listed product can use it along with the AWS cloud. If they want to unsubscribe, instances need to be terminated. AWS Marketplace provides automatic reports that indicate a number of customers that are subscribed.
Final Notes As with any evolving platform, AWS Marketplace is continuously expanding and improving, but not everything is supported yet. For example, for products sold on a monthly basis, the built-in free trial and annual pricing options are still unavailable. In the last two years of partnering with AWS and offering our products in AWS Marketplace, we saw how this platform has grown and matured into a rich market of enterprise cloud services. AWS Marketplace enabled us to grow rapidly worldwide and has been very supportive of our business.
