The growth of online marketplaces
Quocirca’s research shows that almost 70% of organisations have used an online marketplace to purchase office or home print devices in the past year. Indeed, AWS reports that its Marketplace has achieved over 2.5 million active subscriptions, over 4,000 ISVs, and 15,000 product listings in its catalogue.
Quocirca’s Print Industry Trends 2025 predictions advise vendors, MPS providers, and ISVs to ensure they are present on marketplaces to avoid missing out on their customers’ existing committed cloud spend. However, many in the print supply chain find getting onto a marketplace daunting. There have also been worries about the costs of listing on marketplaces. However, all the main platforms have now reduced their costs around this, with AWS now charging a flat 3% fee (or, in some circumstances, lower) on any deal carried out through AWS Marketplace.
From B2C to B2B
Now, AWS is launching a new way for certain vendors to offer their goods on a B2B basis. After launching ‘Buy with Prime’ in 2022, which allowed retailers to make their B2C products directly available to buyers via a single button click, it is now bringing ‘Buy with AWS’ to the market.
Buy with AWS is aimed at ISVs selling software that they have already made available via hosting on the AWS cloud platform. Although ‘Buy with AWS’ still requires a vendor to make its software available through AWS Marketplace, this new single-button approach should make sales easier for vendors and purchases easier for buyers. Large software providers such as Databricks and Workday are already using Buy with AWS on their websites.
The service is stated to be flexible: vendors can ensure that pre-arranged customer discounts are included in the process, and the button can be embedded directly on the vendor’s website rather than within the AWS Marketplace itself.
Whereas Buy with Prime is a chargeable service for those embedding the button on their site, Buy with AWS is a no-charge service. AWS earns revenues by charging the software vendor for running the software on the platform.
This provides software vendors, including MPS providers, with a double win. Listing via AWS Marketplace enables the capture of prospects searching through the Marketplace catalogue for specific services. At the same time, the Buy with AWS button allows easy contract closing and software service provisioning for customers coming via the vendor’s site.
Currently, Buy with AWS is only aimed at software vendors. Vendors offering both hardware and software can include a Buy with Prime and a Buy with AWS button on their site, giving them the advantage of using Prime’s world-class logistics to ensure the hardware reaches the customer rapidly. However, a two-button approach where the underlying systems are disconnected and managed by two discrete teams does not make much sense overall to either seller or buyer.
Will AWS leverage the possibilities?
AWS Marketplace started off as a software-only service but has now expanded to include various other services, such as on-site provisioning and consulting, and can also include hardware sales. For AWS, extending Buy with AWS to include more capabilities makes sense. Many vendors are not just SaaS vendors – they also want to leverage the consultancy market, and much software is sold off the purchase of hardware. However, AWS has to struggle with the resulting cost model – should Buy with AWS remain free when such non-AWS hosted hardware and services are offered? If not, how should these areas be dealt with?
Quocirca opinion
For print hardware vendors and MPS providers interested in the non-software aspects of a deal, being able to leverage AWS’s customer reach, contract management capabilities, logistics, and reporting is a strong pull. It may well be worth putting pressure on AWS to develop a means of supporting a full-service offering via Buy with AWS sooner rather than later.
It is difficult to see many negatives for AWS’s approach around this. The simplicity of the approach should drive more software sales for ISVs, making more money for them and AWS. The customer gains a simpler and quicker method of availing themselves of software services. With Buy with Prime now a proven success (AWS states that it has grown by 45% over the past 12 months), Buy with AWS is also likely to be successful.
This is then likely to drive the other hyperscaler cloud providers (e.g., Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) to start offering similar functionality. It will be good news for those in the print supply chain and customers alike. All that is needed is for vendors to ensure they are up to speed on how the functionality works and for prospects to be made aware of how the process operates for purchasing services.
