Your commercial marketplace benefits

You've published to Microsoft's commercial marketplace, now you want to see your offer be successful. We provide you with the sales and marketing benefits you need to accelerate your offer's growth.

After your offer is live on the commercial marketplace, you can see your unlocked benefits on the Benefits workspace, Marketing benefits page in Partner Center. Marketplace Rewards benefits accrue based on your commercial marketplace engagement and sales. The more you grow, the more benefits you unlock.

Note

Currencies ($) referenced in images in this article are Marketplace Reward benefit tiers, which are based on Marketplace-billed sales (MBS), Business Applications solution value, or Teams App monthly active users (MAU).

ISV Success and Marketplace Rewards

Microsoft is strongly committed to the growth and success of its partner ISVs. Part of that commitment is supporting them throughout the entire journey of building, publishing, and selling apps through the Microsoft commercial marketplace. To further this mission, Marketplace Rewards is now included in ISV Success, a pathway within the AI Cloud Partner Program is now available—at no cost—to all participants.

To see how Marketplace Rewards can help you accelerate growth and close more deals, view this two-minute video:

Marketplace Rewards is designed to support you at your specific stage of growth, starting with awareness activities to help you get your first customers. As you grow through the commercial marketplace, you unlock new benefits designed to help you convert customers and close deals.

The benefits at each stage of growth are designed to progress you to the next stage, allowing you to grow your business to Microsoft customers, with Microsoft's field, and through Microsoft's channel by using the commercial marketplace as your platform.

Your benefits are differentiated based on whether your offer is List, Trial, or Transact.

Based on the type of offering your company published, you'll unlock benefits in the Benefits workspace.

List, Trial, and Consulting offers receive benefits once every 12 months at the partner level. Transactable offers are eligible for evergreen benefit engagement based on performance by trailing 12-months (TTM). For transacting partners, as you grow through the commercial marketplace, you unlock greater benefits, increasing by tier of MBS, Business Applications solution value, or Teams Apps MAU tier for each 12-month period.

The minimum requirement to publish in the online stores is a Partner ID. These benefits are available to all partners regardless of Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program competency, Solutions partner designation, Action Pack subscription status, or partner type. Every partner is empowered to grow your business through the commercial marketplace as a platform.

You'll get support in understanding the resources available to you and in implementing best practices, which you can also review on your own. If you're a partner who publishes a transactable offer, you also get a dedicated Engagement Manager to help you understand, prioritize, and maximize your benefits.

To learn more, see the Marketplace Rewards presentation.

Getting started is easy

  1. Publish an offer in either Microsoft AppSource or Azure Marketplace.

  2. To see your list of benefits, go to the Benefits workspace in Partner Center, and select the Marketing benefits tab.

  3. To activate sales and marketing benefits, you must first assign a company marketing contact. This contact receives follow-up communications about your Marketplace Rewards.

  4. To add or update your marketing contact information:

    1. Go to the top of the Sales and marketing benefits tab on the Marketplace Rewards page, then select Add, update, or change.
    2. Select a user from the list. If the user you want to assign isn't in the list, you can add new users in Account settings.
    3. Provide an email address for the user that's different from the email address associated with your company's Partner Center account. We'll email instructions for using your Marketplace Rewards benefit to your designated marketing contact's email address.
    4. Provide the contact phone and preferred language for this marketing contact. After you finish entering this information, select Assign user.
    5. After you've updated the marketing contact, select Activate for the benefit you want to start using. Once you activate a benefit, a member of the Rewards team will contact your marketing contact within a week.

Note

If your first offer in the 12-trailing months has been live for more than three weeks or if you've earned MBS in the TTM that meets one of the transactable benefit tiers, but have not received your benefits in the Benefit workspace, open a support ticket.

List, trial, and consulting benefits

The first time you publish on the commercial marketplace, you unlock a set of marketing and sales benefits. These benefits are unlocked, at the partner level, once every 12 months. After your offer goes live, go to Partner Center to activate your eligible benefits.

Table that shows eligibility requirements.

Details can be found in the Marketplace Rewards program deck.

Marketplace Rewards for transact partners

When you publish a transactable offer in the commercial marketplace, you'll unlock more benefits as you increase your MBS by tier, Business Applications solutions value, or Teams App MAU through the commercial marketplace for each 12-month period.

Note

Benefits will refresh yearly at the anniversary date of when you first received benefits. Read the benefit guide for full details.

These benefits are designed to support you with marketing and sales activities, to help you to get more visitors, receive more leads, and convert more business.

All partners who have published a transactable offer also can work with a dedicated Engagement Manager to choose the highest-value activities for your portfolio of commercial marketplace offers. This engagement is offered per partner based on MBS in the trailing 12 months. You can choose your activities and the timing of these activities to align to the timing of your company's broader marketing and sales strategies.

Marketing and sales benefits for transact offers

Table that shows sales and marketing benefits for transact offers.

Marketplace Rewards requirements and restrictions

Publisher agreement

All the activities described on this page are covered by the Microsoft publisher agreement and are pursuant to the Commercial Benefits Program Addendum.

Cancellation policy

List and Trial publishers can opt in or opt out to activities per offer publication. Partners can opt out of any engagement at any time.

Microsoft reserves the right to revoke and terminate Marketplace Rewards benefits to publishers who:

  • Engage in illegal activity using their marketplace listing.
  • Receive a purchase that is known or believed to be fraudulent.
  • Are delisted from the commercial marketplace.
  • Use their offer to show marketing or other content that violates copyright or trademark laws.
  • Violate the policies of the Azure sponsorship program, including, but not limited to, using the Azure sponsorship funding for their own internal operations or Bitcoin mining.

Microsoft reserves the right to revoke and terminate Marketplace Rewards when:

  • The customer making the purchase did so accidentally and wishes to cancel the purchase.
  • The customer cancels before using the partner's product.

Offer availability

This offer is conducted in English for all partners with a live offer in the commercial marketplace.

Transactions that are proven to be fraudulent won't count towards a publisher's billed sales program tier, as noted in the list, trial, consulting section and the transact partner benefits section. Microsoft will allocate partners to eligibility tiers based on their actual billed sales, after the fraud has been removed.

Next steps