Amazon Web Services Marketplace China SaaS feature update with tips on how to architect your SaaS subscriptions

{"value":"Amazon Web Services Marketplace has announced that software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions are available in Amazon Web Services Marketplace China. All SaaS products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace China will be sold by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co., Ltd. (NWCD), which is the service operator and provider for Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, and also operates Amazon Web Services Marketplace China. NWCD will appear as the seller of record (SOR) on the customer’s bill for any Amazon Web Services Marketplace SaaS product purchases and will issue the fapiaos to customers directly.\n\n\n### **How to discover SaaS products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace China**\nWith this release, you can easily find SaaS products in [Amazon Web Services Marketplace China](https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn/marketplace). To do so, navigate to Amazon Web Services Marketplace China. In the top navigation, under Delivery Methods, choose **SaaS**. You can further refine results by applying additional search filters from the left sidebar, such as vendors, categories, and pricing plans. You can also search your interested SaaS products by search bar through Chinese or English keywords.\n\nWhen you choose a SaaS product, its product detail page shows the relevant per-unit pricing information. After you subscribe to the SaaS product, you are able to access the SaaS product and will pay only for the service that you consume, with no monthly fees or subscription costs. You will receive your Amazon Web Services Marketplace China bill from NWCD for all applicable fees and charges accrued for your SaaS usage for the previous month at the beginning of each month. Currently, the Amazon Web Services Marketplace China bills will be sent separately from your cloud service bills via email. You can see more details in [FAQs for Amazon Web Services Marketplace China purchase.](https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn/marketplace/help/saas-product-faq?locale=zh)\n\n### **Available SaaS products**\nThe list of products is growing every day. Here is what we are offering so far:\n\n\n\n\n### **To Independent Software Vendors**\nTo successfully create a SaaS subscription in Amazon Web Services Marketplace China, you must integrate your SaaS subscription product with Amazon Web Services Marketplace China for supporting customer onboarding and using your product, including validating customers’ subscriptions before giving them access and metering for their usage. To facilitate the integration with Amazon Web Services Marketplace China, we show how to onboard your customer, report usage to Amazon Web Services Marketplace, and handle SNS message notification systems for subscriptions.\n\n## **How to onboard your customer**\n#### **How to identify the definition of customer registration, SaaS tenant, and SaaS user**\nAfter customers subscribe to your product, they will be redirected to your product registration page, on which they can sign up for an account or log in directly with their credentials. An HTTP POST will be sent to your registration page when customers are redirected from Amazon Web Services Marketplace. This POST request will be a form field named x-amzn-marketplace-token, which can be redeemed via an Amazon Web Services API call to ResolveCustomer to determine the customer ID of the subscriber and the product code of the service they subscribed to.\n\nYou must guide the customer until you obtain the customer’s tenant identity in your SaaS application. You can permit customers to log in to your SaaS application with their existing account or sign up a new account as a new tenant. Finally, when a customer successfully logs in to your SaaS application as a tenant, you can bind the customer’s Amazon Web Services identity and SaaS application tenant identity. Normally, there will be SaaS users under SaaS tenants. If your SaaS users’ charges are collected uniformly through SaaS tenants, you do not need to deal with the connection of SaaS users in the process of integrating with Amazon Web Services Marketplace. If your charging method is based on users’ separate charges, you need to conduct a more granular connection to distinguish Amazon Web Services customer identity from SaaS user identity.\n\n### **How to design the architecture when SaaS applications correspond to multiple products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace**\nThere can be challenges with using the same seller account to publish multiple SaaS products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace. If these SaaS applications use the same tenant registration and verification system and customers log in to the same SaaS application, you will face more complex problems.\n\nAs an example, assume there are two SaaS products you published, namely:\n\n- SaaS1 with product ID product1111\n- SaaS2 with product ID product2222\n\nAfter customers purchase your products through Amazon Web Services Marketplace, you must bind the tenant of SaaS application with the CustomerIdentifier. In generating consumption behavior by users in your SaaS application, you record and integrate this behavior into your users’ tenants and conduct pricing interaction with Amazon Web Services Marketplace through the Amazon Web Services Marketplace API.\n\nIn this scenario, tenant design is as follows:\n\n\n\nIn this tenant design, Marketplace_ Id is the CustomerIdentifier, which comes from the ResolveCustomer API. The value in this column means the tenant enters the SaaS application through the Amazon Web Services Marketplace platform. In the future, all billing related to the tenant uses the value of this column. Billing dimension and usage of the SaaS application interact with Amazon Web Services Marketplace, as shown with the following API call:\n\n```\nJSON\n{\n \"ProductCode\": \" product1111\",\n \"UsageRecords\": [ \n { \n \"CustomerIdentifier\": \"5ha1maxi\",\n \"Dimension\": \"Data\",\n \"Quantity\": 2,\n \"Timestamp\": xxxxx\n }\n ]\n}\n```\n\nIf you have used the same seller account and launched several SaaS products, these SaaS applications use the same tenant registration and verification system.\n\n### **How to architect for Amazon Web Services Marketplace users using some SaaS products not procured in Amazon Web Services Marketplace**\nAfter users select one of your SaaS products through Amazon Web Services Marketplace, purchase, and register or log in, they may use the function of another SaaS application on the shelf in your SaaS application. Your SaaS application calls the Amazon Web Services Marketplace billing API to interact with Amazon Web Services Marketplace according to this function. However, because the user does not subscribe to another product through Amazon Web Services Marketplace, you get an error return.\n\nTherefore, in this special case, your SaaS architecture design is marked at the tenant level according to the number of products on the shelf and bound with your tenant system, as shown in the following table:\n\n\n\nOR\n\n```\nJSON\n{\n \"Tenant_T\": [\n {\n \"TenantID\": \"AAA\",\n \"User\": [\n {\n \"UserID\": \"111\"\n },\n {\n \"UserID\": \"222\"\n },\n {\n \"UserID\": \"333\"\n }\n ],\n \"Marketplace\": [\n {\n\t\t\t \"ProductID\": \"product111\",\n \"MarketplaceID\": \"5ha1maxi\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"TenantID\": \"BBB\",\n \"User\": [\n {\n \"UserID\": \"111\"\n },\n {\n \"UserID\": \"222\"\n }\n ],\n \"Marketplace\": [\n {\n\t\t\t \"ProductID\": \"product111\",\n \"MarketplaceID\": \"5ha1maxi\"\n },\n {\n\t\t\t \"ProductID\": \"product222\",\n \"MarketplaceID\": \" d92nwk21\"\n }\n ]\n }\n ]\n}\n```\n\nUnder this tenant architecture, you can clearly distinguish the relationship among the tenants in Amazon Web Services Marketplace, your products on the shelf, and the tenants of your SaaS application. When a user selects the functions of your SaaS application, you must find the tenant corresponding to the user and the products subscribed through Amazon Web Services Marketplace.\n\nIf the user subscribes to the product to which this function belongs, you can directly use this information to interactively transfer the usage through Amazon Web Services Marketplace API. If the user does not subscribe to this product, your application should handle it accordingly. For example, forbid the user to use this function and guide the customer to subscribe to your product on the corresponding Amazon Web Services Marketplace before using it.\n\n\n### **How to report usage to Amazon Web Services Marketplace**\nWhen you create a SaaS product listing in Amazon Web Services Marketplace, you must design the price model, select the category that best describes your product’s pricing, and then define your pricing dimensions. Each pricing dimension represents a feature or service that you can set a per-unit price for.\n\nYou must also perform usage collection as users use your SaaS application. You must report product usage information to Amazon Web Services Marketplace on an hourly basis via an API call to BatchMeterUsage, which handles up to 25 metering records at a time. Send one record per customer per dimension. Each call should include Customer ID, Dimension Name, Usage Quantity, and UTC timestamp.\n\n### **How to handle SNS message notification systems for subscriptions**\nWhen customers subscribe to or unsubscribe from your service, messages are sent to an [Amazon Simple Notification Service](https://aws.amazon.com/sns/) (Amazon SNS) topic created by Amazon Web Services for your service. It’s a good practice to subscribe to an [Amazon Simple Queue Service](https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/) (Amazon SQS) queue to the topic and then read messages from the queue. By doing this, you won’t lose messages if your service is unavailable.\n\nYou’ll receive SNS messages with the following actions:\n\n- subscribe-success: This means that the customer has successfully subscribed to your product in the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You receive this message asynchronously when customers access your SaaS application.\n- subscribe-fail: This means that customers failed to subscribe to your product in Amazon Web Services Marketplace. This situation is mostly related to the payment verification of the customer on Amazon Web Services. After you receive this notification, you must perform the appropriate logic and suggest the customer go back to Amazon Web Services Marketplace and resubscribe to your product before using it again.\n- unsubscribe-pending: This means that customers have unsubscribed from your product in Amazon Web Services Marketplace and are no longer using your product in Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You will not be able to call the Amazon Web Services Marketplace API to send the customer’s consumption information when the subscription has been canceled. The most important event to handle is the unsubscribe-pending. If you receive this for a customer, you have one hour to report any final usage. After an hour, you receive an unsubscribe-success message and can’t send any metering records for that customer.\n- unsubscribe-success: This means that the customer has successfully unsubscribed from your product in Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You receive this message one hour after unsubscribe-pending, which means that the API call has been closed and you can’t send the user’s usage information to Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You can log off the user or modify the user’s payment method in SaaS application.\n\n### **Additional resources**\nTo get started with Amazon Web Services Marketplace China, operated by NWCD, visit: [https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn](https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn/) or learn more from the [Amazon Web Services Marketplace China FAQ page](https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn/marketplace/help).\n\nIf you are already selling your products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace and would like to take advantage of this new option, contact your Amazon Web Services Business Development Manager. You can also call us via (+86) 10100966-8. If you are new to Amazon Web Services Marketplace China and interested in listing a product in Amazon Web Services Market place China, contact us via the [online application form](https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/marketplace/sign-up/). You can also call the service hotline at (+86) 10100966-8.\n\n### **About the authors**\n\n\n\nMingyue Zhang is a partner solution architect for Amazon Web Services. Zhang Mingyue focuses on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace platform, technical consulting and architectural design of buyers and sellers, and is also responsible for building joint solutions on Amazon Web Services with partners.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","render":"<p>Amazon Web Services Marketplace has announced that software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions are available in Amazon Web Services Marketplace China. All SaaS products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace China will be sold by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co., Ltd. (NWCD), which is the service operator and provider for Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, and also operates Amazon Web Services Marketplace China. NWCD will appear as the seller of record (SOR) on the customer’s bill for any Amazon Web Services Marketplace SaaS product purchases and will issue the fapiaos to customers directly.</p>\n<h3><a id=\"How_to_discover_SaaS_products_in_Amazon_Web_Services_Marketplace_China_3\"></a><strong>How to discover SaaS products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace China</strong></h3>\n<p>With this release, you can easily find SaaS products in <a href=\"https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn/marketplace\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon Web Services Marketplace China</a>. To do so, navigate to Amazon Web Services Marketplace China. In the top navigation, under Delivery Methods, choose <strong>SaaS</strong>. You can further refine results by applying additional search filters from the left sidebar, such as vendors, categories, and pricing plans. You can also search your interested SaaS products by search bar through Chinese or English keywords.</p>\n<p>When you choose a SaaS product, its product detail page shows the relevant per-unit pricing information. After you subscribe to the SaaS product, you are able to access the SaaS product and will pay only for the service that you consume, with no monthly fees or subscription costs. You will receive your Amazon Web Services Marketplace China bill from NWCD for all applicable fees and charges accrued for your SaaS usage for the previous month at the beginning of each month. Currently, the Amazon Web Services Marketplace China bills will be sent separately from your cloud service bills via email. You can see more details in <a href=\"https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn/marketplace/help/saas-product-faq?locale=zh\" target=\"_blank\">FAQs for Amazon Web Services Marketplace China purchase.</a></p>\n<h3><a id=\"Available_SaaS_products_8\"></a><strong>Available SaaS products</strong></h3>\n<p>The list of products is growing every day. Here is what we are offering so far:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://dev-media.amazoncloud.cn/2d998e6aa23d46a4821b6572321d834b_3a02f41d092270e0a0c6d6931998107.jpg\" alt=\"3a02f41d092270e0a0c6d6931998107.jpg\" /></p>\n<h3><a id=\"To_Independent_Software_Vendors_14\"></a><strong>To Independent Software Vendors</strong></h3>\n<p>To successfully create a SaaS subscription in Amazon Web Services Marketplace China, you must integrate your SaaS subscription product with Amazon Web Services Marketplace China for supporting customer onboarding and using your product, including validating customers’ subscriptions before giving them access and metering for their usage. To facilitate the integration with Amazon Web Services Marketplace China, we show how to onboard your customer, report usage to Amazon Web Services Marketplace, and handle SNS message notification systems for subscriptions.</p>\n<h2><a id=\"How_to_onboard_your_customer_17\"></a><strong>How to onboard your customer</strong></h2>\n<h4><a id=\"How_to_identify_the_definition_of_customer_registration_SaaS_tenant_and_SaaS_user_18\"></a><strong>How to identify the definition of customer registration, SaaS tenant, and SaaS user</strong></h4>\n<p>After customers subscribe to your product, they will be redirected to your product registration page, on which they can sign up for an account or log in directly with their credentials. An HTTP POST will be sent to your registration page when customers are redirected from Amazon Web Services Marketplace. This POST request will be a form field named x-amzn-marketplace-token, which can be redeemed via an Amazon Web Services API call to ResolveCustomer to determine the customer ID of the subscriber and the product code of the service they subscribed to.</p>\n<p>You must guide the customer until you obtain the customer’s tenant identity in your SaaS application. You can permit customers to log in to your SaaS application with their existing account or sign up a new account as a new tenant. Finally, when a customer successfully logs in to your SaaS application as a tenant, you can bind the customer’s Amazon Web Services identity and SaaS application tenant identity. Normally, there will be SaaS users under SaaS tenants. If your SaaS users’ charges are collected uniformly through SaaS tenants, you do not need to deal with the connection of SaaS users in the process of integrating with Amazon Web Services Marketplace. If your charging method is based on users’ separate charges, you need to conduct a more granular connection to distinguish Amazon Web Services customer identity from SaaS user identity.</p>\n<h3><a id=\"How_to_design_the_architecture_when_SaaS_applications_correspond_to_multiple_products_in_Amazon_Web_Services_Marketplace_23\"></a><strong>How to design the architecture when SaaS applications correspond to multiple products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace</strong></h3>\n<p>There can be challenges with using the same seller account to publish multiple SaaS products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace. If these SaaS applications use the same tenant registration and verification system and customers log in to the same SaaS application, you will face more complex problems.</p>\n<p>As an example, assume there are two SaaS products you published, namely:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>SaaS1 with product ID product1111</li>\n<li>SaaS2 with product ID product2222</li>\n</ul>\n<p>After customers purchase your products through Amazon Web Services Marketplace, you must bind the tenant of SaaS application with the CustomerIdentifier. In generating consumption behavior by users in your SaaS application, you record and integrate this behavior into your users’ tenants and conduct pricing interaction with Amazon Web Services Marketplace through the Amazon Web Services Marketplace API.</p>\n<p>In this scenario, tenant design is as follows:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://dev-media.amazoncloud.cn/04f7cdd0182140eb832bdc39e1dad479_image.png\" alt=\"image.png\" /></p>\n<p>In this tenant design, Marketplace_ Id is the CustomerIdentifier, which comes from the ResolveCustomer API. The value in this column means the tenant enters the SaaS application through the Amazon Web Services Marketplace platform. In the future, all billing related to the tenant uses the value of this column. Billing dimension and usage of the SaaS application interact with Amazon Web Services Marketplace, as shown with the following API call:</p>\n<pre><code class=\"lang-\">JSON\n{\n &quot;ProductCode&quot;: &quot; product1111&quot;,\n &quot;UsageRecords&quot;: [ \n { \n &quot;CustomerIdentifier&quot;: &quot;5ha1maxi&quot;,\n &quot;Dimension&quot;: &quot;Data&quot;,\n &quot;Quantity&quot;: 2,\n &quot;Timestamp&quot;: xxxxx\n }\n ]\n}\n</code></pre>\n<p>If you have used the same seller account and launched several SaaS products, these SaaS applications use the same tenant registration and verification system.</p>\n<h3><a id=\"How_to_architect_for_Amazon_Web_Services_Marketplace_users_using_some_SaaS_products_not_procured_in_Amazon_Web_Services_Marketplace_56\"></a><strong>How to architect for Amazon Web Services Marketplace users using some SaaS products not procured in Amazon Web Services Marketplace</strong></h3>\n<p>After users select one of your SaaS products through Amazon Web Services Marketplace, purchase, and register or log in, they may use the function of another SaaS application on the shelf in your SaaS application. Your SaaS application calls the Amazon Web Services Marketplace billing API to interact with Amazon Web Services Marketplace according to this function. However, because the user does not subscribe to another product through Amazon Web Services Marketplace, you get an error return.</p>\n<p>Therefore, in this special case, your SaaS architecture design is marked at the tenant level according to the number of products on the shelf and bound with your tenant system, as shown in the following table:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://dev-media.amazoncloud.cn/0c21305a8c0745739cd8900c176eab7d_image.png\" alt=\"image.png\" /></p>\n<p>OR</p>\n<pre><code class=\"lang-\">JSON\n{\n &quot;Tenant_T&quot;: [\n {\n &quot;TenantID&quot;: &quot;AAA&quot;,\n &quot;User&quot;: [\n {\n &quot;UserID&quot;: &quot;111&quot;\n },\n {\n &quot;UserID&quot;: &quot;222&quot;\n },\n {\n &quot;UserID&quot;: &quot;333&quot;\n }\n ],\n &quot;Marketplace&quot;: [\n {\n\t\t\t &quot;ProductID&quot;: &quot;product111&quot;,\n &quot;MarketplaceID&quot;: &quot;5ha1maxi&quot;\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n &quot;TenantID&quot;: &quot;BBB&quot;,\n &quot;User&quot;: [\n {\n &quot;UserID&quot;: &quot;111&quot;\n },\n {\n &quot;UserID&quot;: &quot;222&quot;\n }\n ],\n &quot;Marketplace&quot;: [\n {\n\t\t\t &quot;ProductID&quot;: &quot;product111&quot;,\n &quot;MarketplaceID&quot;: &quot;5ha1maxi&quot;\n },\n {\n\t\t\t &quot;ProductID&quot;: &quot;product222&quot;,\n &quot;MarketplaceID&quot;: &quot; d92nwk21&quot;\n }\n ]\n }\n ]\n}\n</code></pre>\n<p>Under this tenant architecture, you can clearly distinguish the relationship among the tenants in Amazon Web Services Marketplace, your products on the shelf, and the tenants of your SaaS application. When a user selects the functions of your SaaS application, you must find the tenant corresponding to the user and the products subscribed through Amazon Web Services Marketplace.</p>\n<p>If the user subscribes to the product to which this function belongs, you can directly use this information to interactively transfer the usage through Amazon Web Services Marketplace API. If the user does not subscribe to this product, your application should handle it accordingly. For example, forbid the user to use this function and guide the customer to subscribe to your product on the corresponding Amazon Web Services Marketplace before using it.</p>\n<h3><a id=\"How_to_report_usage_to_Amazon_Web_Services_Marketplace_119\"></a><strong>How to report usage to Amazon Web Services Marketplace</strong></h3>\n<p>When you create a SaaS product listing in Amazon Web Services Marketplace, you must design the price model, select the category that best describes your product’s pricing, and then define your pricing dimensions. Each pricing dimension represents a feature or service that you can set a per-unit price for.</p>\n<p>You must also perform usage collection as users use your SaaS application. You must report product usage information to Amazon Web Services Marketplace on an hourly basis via an API call to BatchMeterUsage, which handles up to 25 metering records at a time. Send one record per customer per dimension. Each call should include Customer ID, Dimension Name, Usage Quantity, and UTC timestamp.</p>\n<h3><a id=\"How_to_handle_SNS_message_notification_systems_for_subscriptions_124\"></a><strong>How to handle SNS message notification systems for subscriptions</strong></h3>\n<p>When customers subscribe to or unsubscribe from your service, messages are sent to an <a href=\"https://aws.amazon.com/sns/\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon Simple Notification Service</a> (Amazon SNS) topic created by Amazon Web Services for your service. It’s a good practice to subscribe to an <a href=\"https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon Simple Queue Service</a> (Amazon SQS) queue to the topic and then read messages from the queue. By doing this, you won’t lose messages if your service is unavailable.</p>\n<p>You’ll receive SNS messages with the following actions:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>subscribe-success: This means that the customer has successfully subscribed to your product in the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You receive this message asynchronously when customers access your SaaS application.</li>\n<li>subscribe-fail: This means that customers failed to subscribe to your product in Amazon Web Services Marketplace. This situation is mostly related to the payment verification of the customer on Amazon Web Services. After you receive this notification, you must perform the appropriate logic and suggest the customer go back to Amazon Web Services Marketplace and resubscribe to your product before using it again.</li>\n<li>unsubscribe-pending: This means that customers have unsubscribed from your product in Amazon Web Services Marketplace and are no longer using your product in Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You will not be able to call the Amazon Web Services Marketplace API to send the customer’s consumption information when the subscription has been canceled. The most important event to handle is the unsubscribe-pending. If you receive this for a customer, you have one hour to report any final usage. After an hour, you receive an unsubscribe-success message and can’t send any metering records for that customer.</li>\n<li>unsubscribe-success: This means that the customer has successfully unsubscribed from your product in Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You receive this message one hour after unsubscribe-pending, which means that the API call has been closed and you can’t send the user’s usage information to Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You can log off the user or modify the user’s payment method in SaaS application.</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><a id=\"Additional_resources_134\"></a><strong>Additional resources</strong></h3>\n<p>To get started with Amazon Web Services Marketplace China, operated by NWCD, visit: <a href=\"https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn/\" target=\"_blank\">https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn</a> or learn more from the <a href=\"https://awsmarketplace.amazonaws.cn/marketplace/help\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon Web Services Marketplace China FAQ page</a>.</p>\n<p>If you are already selling your products in Amazon Web Services Marketplace and would like to take advantage of this new option, contact your Amazon Web Services Business Development Manager. You can also call us via (+86) 10100966-8. If you are new to Amazon Web Services Marketplace China and interested in listing a product in Amazon Web Services Market place China, contact us via the <a href=\"https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/marketplace/sign-up/\" target=\"_blank\">online application form</a>. You can also call the service hotline at (+86) 10100966-8.</p>\n<h3><a id=\"About_the_authors_139\"></a><strong>About the authors</strong></h3>\n<p><img src=\"https://dev-media.amazoncloud.cn/4132bd16a0404b38b18cc9c8d7f01b3f_image.png\" alt=\"image.png\" /></p>\n<p>Mingyue Zhang is a partner solution architect for Amazon Web Services. Zhang Mingyue focuses on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace platform, technical consulting and architectural design of buyers and sellers, and is also responsible for building joint solutions on Amazon Web Services with partners.</p>\n"}