Create a subscription for commercial marketplace products

  • Article

You can create a subscription for commercial marketplace products using Partner Center APIs. You must get a list of offers for a market, create and submit an order for a commercial marketplace subscription, then retrieve an activation link.

You can also perform lifecycle management and manage invoices for these subscriptions.

Prerequisites

  • Partner Center authentication credentials. This scenario supports authentication with both standalone App and App+User credentials.
  • The customer identifier. If you don't have a customer's identifier, follow the steps in Get a list of customers. Alternatively, sign in to Partner Center, choose the customer from the list of customers, select Account, then save their Microsoft ID.

Get a list of offers for a market

You can check the available offers for a market using the following Partner Center API models:

  • Product: A grouping construct for purchasable goods or services. A product itself isn't a purchasable item.
  • SKU: A purchasable Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) under a product. These represent the different shapes of the product.
  • Availability: A configuration in which a SKU is available for purchase (such as country/region, currency, or industry segment).

Before you purchase an Azure reservation, complete the following steps:

  1. Identify and retrieve the product and SKU that you want to purchase. If you already know the Product ID and SKU ID, select them.

    Note

    You can identify commercial marketplace products by their ProductType property of "Azure" and their SubType property of "SaaS".

  2. If the SKUs are tagged with an InventoryCheck prerequisite, check the inventory for a SKU.

    Note

    At this time, there are no commercial marketplace products that support inventory check or are tagged with an InventoryCheck prerequisite.

  3. Retrieve the availability for the SKU. You will need the CatalogItemId of the availability when placing the order, which you can retrieve through the following APIs:

Create and submit an order

To submit your Azure reservation order, follow these steps:

  1. Create a cart to hold the collection of catalog items that you intend to buy. When you create a cart, the cart line items are automatically grouped based on what can be purchased together in the same order. (You can also update a cart.)
  2. Check out the cart, which results in the creation of an order.

Get order details

You can retrieve the details of an individual order using the order ID. You can also retrieve a list of all orders for a specific customer.

Note

After an order is submitted, there is a delay of up to 15 minutes before the order appears in that customer's order list.

The partner or customer must activate subscriptions to Azure Marketplace products. You can get an activation link by order line item. You can also get a subscription by ID, then enumerate its Links property to create an activation link.

Lifecycle management

You can manage the lifecycle of your subscriptions to commercial marketplace products using the following methods:

Quantity management

The quantity of a commercial marketplace subscription must be within the limits defined by its associated SKU (see the minimumQuantity and maximumQuantity attributes). To update the quantity of a commercial marketplace subscription, use the following method:

Invoice and reconciliation

You can manage customer invoices (including charges for subscriptions to commercial marketplace products) using the following methods:

Test using integration sandbox account

In production, after you've created a subscription to commercial marketplace SaaS products, you need to retrieve a personalized activation link from Partner Center and visit the publisher's site to complete the setup process. Subscription billing will begin only after setup is complete.

In the CSP sandbox environment, there is no integration with ISVs. If you try to retrieve an activation link from Partner Center, a dummy link will be returned. You can't use this dummy link to complete the setup process at the publisher's site. To use the integration sandbox account to test billing for subscriptions to commercial marketplace SaaS products, use the following method to activate the subscription instead. Subscription billing will begin after successful activation: