AWS announced Buy with AWS at re:Invent last week: a way to put AWS Marketplace procurement on your own website, so a buyer can purchase with their AWS account without being sent off to a marketplace page first. Seventeen partners went live at launch.
Taken on its own that is a convenience feature. Taken together with how committed cloud spend works, it closes a gap that has been costing marketplace sellers deals.
Start with committed spend, because that is the actual mechanism
Enterprise AWS customers typically hold a spend commitment — an agreement to spend a certain amount over a term in exchange for better rates. The money is allocated. It has a deadline. And if it goes unspent, somebody has an uncomfortable conversation.
Software purchased through AWS Marketplace draws down against that commitment.
Read that again, because it inverts the usual sales problem. Normally you are asking a customer to find new budget, which means competing against every other priority and waiting for a budget cycle. With a marketplace purchase against committed spend, the budget exists, it is already approved, and it is under time pressure to be used.
That is the single strongest argument for being on a marketplace, and it has nothing to do with discovery.
The second mechanism: quota credit
The other half is why AWS people help you.
When a deal transacts through AWS Marketplace, the AWS account team covering that customer receives credit toward their quota. An AWS seller with quota exposure to your transaction is an AWS seller with a reason to introduce you, attend your meeting, and tell their customer that buying through the marketplace is the easy path.
Every co-sell program across every cloud reduces to this. If you remember one thing about cloud go-to-market, it is that the cloud field team’s compensation is the engine, and marketplace transaction is what connects your deal to it.
What Buy with AWS changes
Until now the procurement step meant sending your buyer away. They are on your pricing page, convinced, and the next thing you do is link them to a marketplace listing on a different domain with a different layout. Some fraction of them do not arrive.
Buy with AWS moves that step onto your site. The buyer clicks a button in your own page and lands directly in the procurement flow with their AWS account.
The mechanics, from AWS’s seller onboarding guidance:
- The URL is a procurement endpoint carrying your
productIdandsellerId, plusisBuyWithAWS=true - You can optionally pin a specific
offerId - You can pass a
sourceURLso AWS knows where the click came from - Parameters are case-sensitive.
offerIdworks,offerIDdoes not - A missing mandatory parameter gives the buyer a 404, not a helpful error
That last pair is worth flagging to whoever implements it. The failure mode is silent on your side and highly visible on the buyer’s.
There is also a metrics script AWS provides, which reports button clicks back to the marketplace console. Worth adding at the same time rather than later, since otherwise you have no idea whether the button is being used.
Two practical notes:
sourceURL must match your registered company website. AWS validates it as a prefix match against the website on your seller profile. A different subdomain is not a match, which is an easy thing to get wrong if your marketing site and your registered URL differ.
Think before pinning an offer. Without an offerId, the buyer sees every offer they are entitled to — including a private offer written specifically for them. Pinning your public offer can hide the negotiated one you prepared for that customer. Default to not pinning unless you have a specific reason.
AWS also requires a branding review before you launch the button publicly, so build that into your timeline rather than discovering it at the end.
What this does not change
Buy with AWS removes a click. It does not remove any of the work underneath it:
- Your listing still needs to exist and be correct
- Fulfillment still has to resolve the registration token and provision the customer, as covered in metering and entitlements
- Large deals still close as private offers, not as button clicks
- Reconciliation is unchanged
It is a conversion improvement on a channel you still have to build properly. Useful, not transformative.
The direction of travel
Worth noting what else moved in the last few weeks, because it rhymes.
Google announced an AI agent ecosystem program in November, including a marketplace category for partner-built agents and co-selling support for them. Microsoft halved the agency fee on renewals sold as private offers from October 1.
Three clouds, three moves, one theme: the marketplaces are being pushed from passive catalogues toward being the default procurement path, with incentives adjusted to match. The sensible read for an ISV is that marketplace capability is becoming table stakes rather than a differentiator.
If you are implementing it
Get the parameter names exactly right, register the correct sourceURL, add the metrics script, decide deliberately whether to pin an offer, and book the branding review early. Our marketplace platform covers the listing and offer layer behind it, and co-sell covers the quota-credit motion that makes any of this worth doing.
The summary
Committed spend is why marketplace deals close faster, quota credit is why cloud sellers help, and Buy with AWS removes the hand-off that was losing you buyers between your pricing page and the transaction. The underlying work is the same as it was last month.