Once you are selling through a cloud marketplace, the next question is usually whether your resellers can too. They can — but the mechanism changes who holds the paper, who gets paid by whom, and what your listing fee becomes.
The AWS version is the channel partner private offer, universally shortened to CPPO. Microsoft and Google Cloud have equivalents that work differently in ways that matter.
The AWS model: resale authorization, then a CPPO
Two steps, two parties.
First, you as the ISV create a resale authorization for a specific channel partner: which of your products they may resell, at what wholesale price, for how long, under what terms. AWS calls this a selling authorization — an agreement between you and the partner establishing the right to resell.
Second, the channel partner creates a channel partner private offer to their end customer, built from that authorization. They set the customer-facing price, duration, end-user licence terms and any services they bundle in. When they create or update it, the draft carries the terms and rules from the resale authorization and is invisible to the buyer until they make it available.
The consequence that surprises ISVs: the channel partner owns the financial and contractual relationship with the customer. AWS is explicit that with CPPO, channel partners own and maintain that relationship. You are not on the customer’s paper. For some deals that is exactly what the customer wants — they already have a procurement relationship with that reseller. For others it is a reason to transact directly.
A practical note for anyone with more than a handful of resellers: resale authorization can be automated through the AWS Marketplace Catalog API rather than created by hand each time.
What CPPO costs
AWS applies a 0.5% uplift to the listing fee for CPPO products, regardless of offer type or deployment method. So a SaaS private offer under $1M in total contract value sits at 3% direct and 3.5% through the channel.
One detail in that documentation is easy to miss and works in your favour: the listing fee is calculated on the discounted price you offered the channel partner, not on what the partner charges the customer. Their margin is not part of your fee base.
If you need the underlying rate card, we covered the full fee structure when AWS reset it last year.
Microsoft: multiparty private offers
Microsoft’s channel route through its commercial marketplace is the multiparty private offer, or MPO. The structure of the money is the thing to understand, because it inverts the AWS arrangement.
Microsoft collects payment from the customer and pays the channel partner directly. The channel partner then pays the software company outside the marketplace, under whatever agreement the two of you have.
So on AWS the reseller transacts and holds the customer contract; with Microsoft the platform bills the customer, routes money to the partner, and your payment arrives off-platform from the partner. That difference lands squarely on your finance team — one path produces a marketplace disbursement you can reconcile, the other produces a partner receivable.
Microsoft positions MPO for enterprise customers on an Enterprise Agreement or Microsoft Customer Agreement, with the channel partner overseeing the customer relationship while Microsoft bills the customer. There is also a separate CSP private offer path for selling through a customer’s Cloud Solution Provider.
Microsoft has been pushing hard here. Partners in Canada, the UK and the US can now sell professional services through private offers, and Microsoft halved the agency fee on renewals sold as private offers effective October 1, 2024.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud Marketplace supports reseller transactions as well, under a transaction model framework that has shifted over time — the agency model has applied to certain transactions since October 2023. If channel is central to your Google Cloud motion, confirm which transaction model applies to your specific product and offer type rather than assuming, because it determines the flow of funds.
What this means operationally
Three clouds, three answers to the same four questions:
- Who issues the customer’s invoice? AWS: the marketplace, against the channel partner’s offer. Microsoft: Microsoft. Google: depends on the transaction model.
- Who do you get paid by? AWS: marketplace disbursement. Microsoft: the channel partner, off-platform. Google: depends.
- Whose paper is the customer on? AWS: the channel partner’s. Microsoft: the channel partner oversees the relationship, Microsoft bills.
- What is the fee? AWS: base rate plus a 0.5% CPPO uplift, calculated on your wholesale price.
If you run channel across more than one cloud, those differences are not trivia. They determine how many reconciliation paths your finance team maintains and how many places a renewal can go missing.
That is the problem CloudX’s marketplace platform is built around — agreements, billing and disbursements across clouds in one record, with revenue reconciliation per customer. Channel deals are where multi-cloud accounting gets genuinely hard, because half the money arrives through a path your marketplace reports cannot see.
For the go-to-market side of partner selling, co-sell covers how cloud field teams and your resellers end up working the same deal rather than competing over it.
Before you authorize your first reseller
Decide three things in advance: which products are resellable and at what wholesale price, whether you are comfortable not holding the customer contract on AWS deals, and who on your side reconciles partner-sourced revenue each month. The mechanics are documented and workable. The gap is usually that nobody owns the third one.