Key Takeaways from Mastering the Marketplace: Developing your SaaS offer

The recent Mastering the Marketplace webinar on Developing your SaaS offer is a session for ISVs to learn how to implement the components of a fully functional SaaS solution including: SaaS landing page, Webhook to subscribe to change events, Integrating your SaaS product into the marketplace, and more!

 

Here's a summary of key takeaways from the event. If you want to access the full content, I encourage you to register and watch the recording.

 

• This session is for ISVs and sellers who want to sell SaaS products on the Microsoft commercial market, and the agenda covers what is a SaaS offer, where would the ISV go to build and publish SaaS offerings, how can you define pricing on SaaS offers, and what building models are available.
• The webinar covers the SaaS offer creation process, the essential pieces of the SaaS offer, and the purchase process, which includes the landing page, webbook, admin portal, and the SaaS product site.
  • The free trial cannot be combined with the custom meters, but if you remove this, you can enable a 30 day free trial and then you can make this plan public or private.
  • If you want to resell, you can make a selection on your preference for that,
  • We ask the customer to go to the ISVs landing page to complete the sign up process. This way the ISV will have the customer on their webpage with the landing page for the ISV to take the customer through the fulfillment and the service provisioning process.
• The purchase process in the Azure Marketplace involves a landing page that displays SaaS subscription information to validate the offer, integrates the admin portal to configure and activate the customer SaaS subscription, presents the form as an order confirmation, and requires Azure AD authentication.
  • By this time, the landing page will have the logged in user information and the SaaS subscription information that the customer subscribed to the publisher.
  • If the customer onboarding requires additional information from the customer, this is the place to ask that information and send that information out to the ISV's operations team which can be used to onboard the customer to the product.
  • The webinar shows a demo to see the purchase process, how a customer can end up on the landing page, and how an example of the landing page can look.
• The webinar provides step-by-step guide on the process of creating a landing page for a publisher and explains the steps to complete the sign-up process, including the use of Azure AD authentication, the Resolve API, and the activation API.
  • First, you have a customer subscribe to your offer and the customer is asked to get to the landing page to complete the sign up.
  • Then, once the authentication is complete, landing page will get an authorization token to call the Marketplace API.
  • Planning page will call the Fulfillment API, specifically the Resolve API, to resolve the Customer SAS subscription information.
  • Once the customer confirms, the landing page can sign up the new customer and acknowledge back to the customer and the publisher, provision the customer account and provides access information to the customer on how they can access the product.
• The webinar explains the flow of a Webbook, which is a set-up by the ISV, and the publisher SaaS service, which is by the customer. It explains the different types of Webbook notifications, including change plan, change quantities, suspend, renew, or unsubscribe, and an unsubscribed event.
  • The flow starts when the marketplace will initiate the subscription event on a customer's change.
  • It is meant to get you thinking about how you might use your webbook scenario in your production.
  • Use the Marketplace fulfillment behind the scenes to help view and manage task subscriptions.
• The webinar provides a sample of an admin portal from the SaaS Accelerator reference implementation, which is open source and can be installed within minutes, and explains how metered billing works, including the dimensions, pricing, and metered billing.