Marketplace buying experience not yet mature for native Teams apps?

[Christoph Schoch]

We have been launching a Teams App in marketplace lately and yes it was an experience , but we got some good support from the ISV Benefits program and finally made it.

So far so good, but now finally on the Teams Store, we are thinking about pulling it away from marketplace again, at least for the commercial part. We believe the marketplace is lacking maturity for selling our Teams app. Our main issues are: 

• the buying/checkout process is far away from being flawless, too many dependencies on tenant roles or other issues. (unable to add credit card, can't save billing profile, error messages on checkout etc.) and finally no help there...
• If the customer fails to buy, we lose twice. All our marketing and selling efforts are at danger and finally we don't get the app sold. If the customer contacts us we are glad to help him opening a ticket with Microsoft support, but this is typically a very time consuming and frustrating experience for the customer (and finally for us, which kills any profitability)
• Lack of timely support. Even if you open tickets, it's either taking ages to get someone to respond or you just get burried with "do this, do that" - but issues drag forever
• I believe Microsoft doesn't allow prepaid credit cards for customers, which is somewhat common
• Microsoft finally allowed payments by using bank wire by invoice (something our European customers are looking for in their Purchasing departments). But the hurdles to get this enabled with Microsoft support are too high
• Lately they just changed the buying experience for Teams apps. In dark mode the customer can't even read the description of the apps. The sort order defined on our SKUs is just pure random, so I wonder how a customer can navigate this or even getting close to buy an app

Are we the only one experiencing this? For us, marketplace makes our life way more complex than it would make it easier, any thoughts on this?

[#2]

@Christoph Schoch Thanks for your feedback here. A few comments to follow up:

Your first comment is related to the errors user encounter: These errors could be because of multiple reasons our Mcirosoft commerce system encountered during the purchase. Today both admins and information works can purchase the 3P SaaS in Teams as long as it is enabled by the tenant. All our purchases go through Microsoft commerce systems which has multiple checks in place to make we are compliant. In case of specific failures, we generally display error to the customer so they can retry. In other cases the account might go through background risk check and needs to go under review. Agree that some of these errors are not self explanatory in 100% cases and we are actively working on solving these with our new purchase experience

For your 4th and 5th comments - Yes, Microsoft has its own checks for the payment methods enabled in Teams for purchase. For 3P SaaS app purchases, we support purchases using credit cards. We do have stringent fraud checks because of which the payment methods enabled for purchase have to meet those criteria. For invoice pay to be enabled there is a set of process we have at Microsoft as part of Commerce credit, risk checks and each tenant billing account who wants to enable this has to go through those steps. This is to make sure we are compliant and meeting all fraud checks in place.

Re: your last comment, for dark mode will let the store team know so they can look into this experience. For sort order of SKUs, we are aware of this issue and are actively working with our team on this.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions or feedback.

[#3]

@Christoph Schoch I also wanted to mention that if you have a transactable Teams app on marketplace, we invite you to join a private group specifically for Monetized Teams ISVs where you can interact more directly with our Teams team. If you are interested in joining, please send me a direct message on this community site.