First, the rebrand
If you've been in the Microsoft ecosystem for a while, you'll have known two storefronts: AppSource for business applications and Azure Marketplace for infrastructure and developer offers. Microsoft has consolidated them. There's now one destination - Microsoft Marketplace - and the old names are on their way out of Microsoft's own language.
That matters more than a naming tidy-up. A single storefront means one discovery surface, one set of listing mechanics and one place where a buyer's procurement team ends up. It also means the internal argument about "which marketplace do we list on?" has gone away, and been replaced by a better question: is our listing good enough to be chosen from?
For most partners the answer is no, and it isn't because the product is weak. It's because the listing was written once, by whoever had capacity, as a compliance exercise.
What you can put in the marketplace
Four broad offer types, with very different levels of effort and very different returns.
Software offers
SaaS apps, virtual machines, containers and add-ins. The core of what most ISVs list, and the type most likely to be transactable.
Consulting offers
Fixed-scope assessments, workshops, briefings, proofs of concept and implementations. The obvious route in for services partners with no product to sell.
Managed services
Ongoing managed offerings packaged with a defined scope and price. Increasingly common as partners productise retainers.
Co-sell listed offers
Offers that meet Microsoft's criteria to be actively sold alongside Microsoft's own sales teams. This is the status that changes the economics.
Why "transactable" is the word that matters
A listing can be a brochure or it can be a shop. A brochure listing sends the buyer off to a contact form. A transactable offer lets them buy through Microsoft, on Microsoft paper, against a budget they've already committed.
That last part is the commercial unlock. Enterprise customers who've signed an Azure consumption commitment can retire that commitment against eligible marketplace purchases. If your offer is transactable, buying from you helps them meet a commitment they've already made. If it isn't, buying from you is a new line of spend that needs its own justification.
Ask any enterprise seller which of those two conversations they'd rather have. It's also why a transactable offer tends to attract more attention from Microsoft's sales teams than a comparable non-transactable one - it's simply easier for them to attach to a deal.
Listing types compared
| Listing type | What the buyer can do | Effort to set up | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contact me | Submit an enquiry that lands with your sales team | Low | Testing demand, or complex bespoke work with no fixed price |
| Free trial / test drive | Try the product before talking to anyone | Medium | Self-serve software where the product sells itself |
| Transactable software offer | Buy through Microsoft, often against a consumption commitment | High | ISVs with productised, priced software |
| Consulting or managed service offer | Buy a fixed-scope engagement or ongoing service | Medium | Services partners productising assessments, workshops and retainers |
How buyers and sellers actually find you
The marketplace isn't one funnel. It's several, and they reward different things.
Search inside the marketplace
Keyword-driven and unforgiving. Titles and summaries written in internal product language simply don't surface.
Microsoft sellers
They search for something they can attach to an account. Clear scope, clear outcome and a named solution area make you findable and repeatable.
Category and filter browsing
Buyers filter by industry, solution area and product. Wrong or missing categories quietly remove you from the shortlist.
Public web search
Marketplace pages rank in Google. A well-written listing is an extra indexed page describing exactly what you sell.
Procurement
Sometimes the buyer already knows you and just needs a compliant way to purchase. The listing is the paperwork shortcut.
Commitment-led buying
Finance teams actively look for eligible purchases to retire a committed spend. Transactable offers turn up in that search.
Making a listing earn its keep
A practical sequence, in the order we'd actually do it.
Write the title for the buyer, not the brand
"Copilot readiness assessment for regulated organisations" beats a product codename every time. Lead with the outcome and the audience.
Fix the summary
You get a short summary and a longer description. Treat the summary as the only thing anyone reads, because for most visitors it is.
Pick categories and industries deliberately
Under-tagging removes you from filtered results. Over-tagging puts you in front of people who bounce. Choose the handful you can genuinely win.
Price something
Even an indicative fixed scope beats "contact us". It's the single biggest driver of enquiries we see on consulting offers.
Go transactable where you can
If there's a productised element you can sell at a fixed price, make it transactable so it can retire committed spend.
Treat it as a live page
Review it every quarter against your current positioning. Most listings are stale within a year of going up.
Quick audit of your current listing
If more than two of these are true, your listing is costing you opportunities.
- The title contains an internal product name a buyer wouldn't recognise.
- The summary describes features rather than an outcome.
- There's no price, no scope and no indication of duration.
- It hasn't been updated since it was first published.
- Nobody in the business knows how many views or leads it generates.
- It says something different to your website about what you actually do.
Where it fits in the wider picture
A marketplace listing isn't a demand-generation channel on its own. It's a conversion surface. It works when there's already a reason for someone to look you up - a campaign, a Microsoft seller conversation, a referral, a search - and it fails quietly when it's the only thing you've done.
The partners who get real returns from it treat the listing as the same asset as their website's service page: same positioning, same proof, same clarity about who it's for. Then they point activity at it, and they measure what comes back.
That's the whole trick. The marketplace rewards partners who've done the positioning work everywhere else, and it's fairly ruthless with the ones who haven't.