Publishing guide by offer type

  • Article

This article describes the offer types that are available in the commercial marketplace. The offer type defines the offer structure, which includes the metadata, artifacts, and other content presented in the commercial marketplace.

After you decide on a publishing option , you must choose an offer type before you start creating your offer in Partner Center. The offer type will correspond to the type of solution, app, or service offer that you wish to publish, as well as its alignment to Azure products and services.

Note

After you select an offer type, you can't change the offer to another type. To create a different offer type, you need to create a new offer.

You can configure a single offer type in different ways to enable different publishing options, listing option, provisioning, or pricing. The publishing option and configuration of the offer type also align to the offer eligibility and technical requirements.

Be sure to review the online store and offer type eligibility requirements and the technical publishing requirements before creating your offer.

To publish your offers to Azure Marketplace, you need to have a commercial marketplace account in Partner Center and ensure your account is enrolled in the commercial marketplace program. See Create a commercial marketplace account in Partner Center and Verify your account information when you enroll in a new Partner Center program.

List of offer types

The following table shows the commercial marketplace offer types in Partner Center.

Offer type Description
Azure Application There is only one kind of Azure application plan: solution template. This plan type supports automating the deployment and configuration of a solution beyond a single virtual machine (VM). You can automate the process of providing multiple resources, including VMs, networking, and storage resources to provide complex solutions, such as IaaS solutions. This plan type can employ many different kinds of Azure resources, including but not limited to VMs.
  • Solution template plans are one of the main ways to publish a solution in the commercial marketplace. Solution template plans are not transactable in the commercial marketplace, but they can be used to deploy paid VM offers that are billed through the commercial marketplace. Use the solution template plan type when the customer will manage the solution and the transactions are billed through another plan.
Azure virtual machine Use the virtual machine offer type when you deploy a virtual appliance to the subscription associated with your customer.
Consulting service Consulting services help to connect customers with services to support and extend their use of Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 or Power Suite services.

Next steps

  • Review the eligibility requirements in the corresponding article for your offer type to finalize the selection and configuration of your offer.
  • Review the publishing patterns for each online store for examples on how your solution maps to an offer type and configuration.