Picture this: your company developed a SaaS product and your marketing team wants to sell more of it. Where can you look for opportunities to sell more? One way of doing it is to search for new sales channels to enlarge and diversify your customer base.

Marketplaces are a popular way to sell products and services to a curated customer base. You are certainly familiar with marketplaces like Google Play and App Store for mobile apps but is there a marketplace for selling SaaS products? Enter the AWS Marketplace, the AWS curated digital catalogue that offers software products to customers worldwide.

Why AWS Marketplace for SaaS Products?

AWS Marketplace serves as a powerful platform for selling SaaS products and provides visibility and access to a global customer base. By listing your SaaS product on this platform, you can tap into AWS’ extensive customer network, which includes enterprises, startups, and individual developers across various industries. This exposure can significantly boost visibility to your SaaS product, drive adoption among customers that you may not currently reach, and provide an additional revenue stream.

A useful feature offered by AWS Marketplace is the payment integration. This allows your customers to purchase SaaS products directly via their AWS accounts and can significantly simplify the procurement process. For example, if you’re selling a SaaS product to an enterprise, sometimes you’ll have to follow rigorous procurement standards. This can be really time consuming and can slow down sales. But if your customer already buys from AWS, selling through AWS Marketplace can help side-step those procurement processes and get to revenues quicker.

Need some examples? MongoDB Atlas and DataDog are two popular SaaS products that have increased their visibility, adoption, and revenue stream thanks to AWS Marketplace. Could your SaaS product become the next big thing on AWS Marketplace?

How to List your SaaS Product on AWS Marketplace

To list a SaaS product on AWS Marketplace, you must meet specific technical requirements and undergo a rigorous review process. This process includes ensuring that your SaaS offering is compatible with AWS services, adheres to security and compliance standards, and provides a good user experience.

In a nutshell, the procedure to list your SaaS product on AWS Marketplace follows these steps:

1. Sign Up: Register as a seller on AWS Marketplace.
2. Product Submission: Submit your product by providing all necessary information, including product details, pricing, and technical documentation.
3. Review Process: AWS conducts a review to ensure your product meets their standards.
4. Listing and Launch: Once approved, your product is listed on AWS Marketplace, and you can start marketing to AWS customers.

In our experience the tricky bit is to integrate your SaaS product with AWS: you need to deploy an infrastructure similar to that shown in the diagram below - in particular the architecture within the AWS Seller Account - and implement a suitable pricing model that AWS can use to bill your customers. You can choose between a contracts-only model (e.g. monthly contract), a subscriptions-only model (e.g. billed per minute and/or per a specific metric), or a mix of the two pricing models.

Work with an AWS Partner

This integration architecture might look daunting, especially if it’s the first time you’ve listed a product on AWS Marketplace. Why not consider engaging an AWS Partner like The Scale Factory to deploy the architecture and integrate your SaaS product with AWS Marketplace? It’s a one-off process we can take care of and we can work with you to define and set up the best pricing model for your SaaS product.

We also offer consulting services like the Foundation Technical Review to ensure your product meets AWS standards, and SaaS Foundations, which provides best practices and technical guidance for building, scaling and securing SaaS solutions on AWS. Here below I describe in more detail how these two consulting offerings can help.

Foundation Technical Review (FTR)

This consulting service involves a thorough examination of your SaaS product’s architecture, security, and integration with AWS services. Our review ensures that your product adheres to AWS’ best practices so that you can proudly display a “reviewed by AWS” badge on your Marketplace listing. An FTR is also a requirement for membership of the ISV Accelerate program. If you want to know more what an FTR involves, read this blog post about FTR from my colleague Adam.

SaaS Foundations

When building your SaaS product, it’s important to build on top of good operations and security practices. This consulting package provides a well-architected AWS landing zone, at a fixed price. As well as making it easier to pass a Foundational Technical Review, our SaaS Foundations package can help you achieve industry compliance standards such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA.

Conclusion

Listing your SaaS product on AWS Marketplace can unlock significant benefits, including access to a broader customer base, enhanced visibility, and a quicker procurement process for your customers. With our help and experience you can navigate the complexity of listing and integrating your SaaS product on AWS Marketplace and focus on setting up a suitable pricing model for your customers.

Embrace the opportunity to expand your reach and drive growth by leveraging the power of AWS Marketplace.

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Listing your SaaS solution on AWS Marketplace opens doors to growth and success. By pairing it with an AWS Foundational Technical Review from an AWS Partner, you ensure that you have the confidence to deliver a robust, secure, and high-performing application to your customers.

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This blog is written exclusively by The Scale Factory team. We do not accept external contributions.