AWS Marketplace POs: Better Control, Faster Buying

Procurement bottlenecks rarely start with bad intentions. They start with good engineers trying to ship, a finance team trying to close the month, and a governance team trying to keep auditors calm. Somewhere in the middle, a Marketplace subscription gets approved “just this once,” the PO comes later (or never), and cost allocation becomes a messy spreadsheet exercise.

AWS quietly fixed a big part of that workflow on December 17, 2025: AWS Marketplace now supports mandatory purchase orders (POs) and custom messaging at the time of purchase. If you run cloud procurement, software asset management (SAM), or cloud governance, this is one of those small UI changes that turns into real operational impact.

This post is part of our AI in Supply Chain & Procurement series, so I’ll go a step further than the feature announcement. The interesting part isn’t “you can require a PO.” It’s what this enables: purchase approvals that are machine-checkable, vendor interactions that are more standardized, and spend signals that AI can actually use for forecasting, allocation, and policy enforcement.

What AWS Marketplace changed (and why it matters)

Answer first: AWS Marketplace admins can now (1) require a PO for subscriptions and (2) show buyers a custom message on the procurement page—both at the exact moment someone tries to buy.

Here’s what’s new:

• Mandatory purchase order requirement: Admins can enforce a rule that buyers must provide a PO when subscribing to AWS Marketplace products.
• Custom messaging on the procurement page: Admins can add guidance like policy reminders, which cost center to use, internal support contacts, or what “good” looks like for compliant purchases.
• Broad applicability: The PO requirement can be applied to private and public offers and across various pricing types.
• Works with Private Marketplace: If you already curate approved products via Private Marketplace, this adds a second layer: approved catalog + enforced procurement data.
• Availability: This is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Marketplace is supported.

Why I like this update: it pushes governance upstream. You’re not chasing artifacts after the spend happens. You’re shaping the transaction while it’s happening.

The real problem: cloud buying is fast, and governance is slow

Answer first: Cloud procurement breaks because the buying motion is self-serve, while approval, coding, and attribution are still treated like back-office work.

In classic procurement, you had time. In cloud procurement, you have click-to-subscribe.

When an engineer can procure a third-party tool in minutes, the organization needs controls that are:

• Immediate (at the purchase moment)
• Standardized (same requirements every time)
• Low-friction (or people will route around them)

Mandatory POs inside AWS Marketplace matter because they change the compliance pattern from:

“Detect and remediate” to “Prevent and guide.”

And the custom message feature matters more than it sounds. Most policy violations aren’t malicious—they’re confusing. A single sentence like “Use cost center 4207 for AI training workloads; PO required; contact FinOps Slack channel for exceptions” prevents a week of cleanup.

Mandatory POs as a data quality upgrade (the AI angle)

Answer first: Requiring a PO at checkout creates structured spend metadata that AI and automation can use for forecasting, anomaly detection, and chargeback.

If you’re investing in AI for procurement, you already know the dirty secret: models are only as useful as the inputs. In cloud spend, inputs often arrive late (after invoices) and messy (free text, inconsistent tagging, missing cost center mapping).

A mandatory PO requirement improves three things immediately:

1) Cleaner cost allocation and chargeback

A PO can serve as a join key across systems: finance, ERP, project tracking, and cloud billing. If the PO is collected at the point of purchase, you’re not trying to reconstruct “who bought what and why” later.

Practical impact:

• Fewer “unassigned” Marketplace line items
• Faster internal chargeback/showback cycles
• Better attribution for shared services (security tools, observability, data platforms)

2) Better vendor relationship signals

In supply chain terms, Marketplace is a vendor channel. If each purchase includes a PO, your organization creates consistent vendor interaction records. That’s the raw material for automation such as:

• Renewal reminders tied to PO end dates
• Spend concentration analysis by vendor category
• Contract compliance checks against approved offers

3) More reliable inputs for intelligent procurement automation

Once POs are consistently captured, you can automate decisions that used to require manual review:

• Flag purchases without the expected cost center for a given AWS account
• Detect “new vendor introduction” events in near real time
• Predict which teams are likely to exceed quarterly budgets based on Marketplace subscriptions

If you’re serious about AI in procurement, treat this as a data instrumentation upgrade, not just a governance feature.

Custom messaging: small UX change, big workflow payoff

Answer first: Custom messaging reduces exceptions by telling buyers the rules and the fastest compliant path—right where mistakes happen.

Most companies bury Marketplace buying rules in a wiki. That’s the wrong place. The right place is the purchase screen.

Here’s what I’ve found works best when writing custom messages:

Make the message operational, not legal

Good:

• “PO required. Use your project’s PO or request one via ServiceNow form ‘Cloud Software PO’. Typical turnaround: 24 hours.”

Bad:

• “All purchases must comply with corporate procurement policy.”

Include decision shortcuts

Add small routing rules that prevent back-and-forth:

• Which cost center to use for common categories (security, observability, ML tooling)
• When a private offer is required vs allowed public offer
• Who approves exceptions

Add a single support contact

A single contact beats a list. For example:

• “Questions: Cloud Procurement Ops (internal queue) — response SLA 4 business hours.”

It’s not glamorous, but it’s how you cut your exception volume.

How this fits into Private Marketplace and procurement governance

Answer first: Private Marketplace controls what can be bought; mandatory POs and messaging control how it gets bought.

Private Marketplace gives you a curated catalog for specific users and groups. That’s already a strong guardrail for vendor risk and standardization.

Now you can pair it with purchase-time governance:

• Catalog control: Approved vendors/products only
• Transaction control: PO required + buyer guidance

This combination is a practical foundation for mature cloud procurement:

1. Reduce vendor sprawl (fewer random tools)
2. Improve compliance (required artifacts captured upfront)
3. Speed up approvals (fewer “who do I ask?” delays)
4. Produce better spend intelligence (cleaner metadata)

And it maps cleanly to how AI procurement systems work: constrain the options, standardize the inputs, then automate the outcomes.

Implementation checklist: how to adopt this without slowing teams down

Answer first: Start with a narrow scope, standardize PO formats, and measure exception rates before expanding.

If you flip “mandatory PO” on everywhere overnight, you might get pushback—especially from teams used to moving fast. A phased rollout is smarter.

Step 1: Start with the highest-risk categories

Common starting points:

• Security and compliance tooling
• Data egress / networking add-ons
• AI/ML and data labeling services (often variable spend)

Step 2: Decide what “valid PO” means internally

If your PO values are inconsistent, you’ll just collect junk. Define:

• Allowed PO format(s) (length, prefix, numeric-only vs alphanumeric)
• Whether a placeholder PO is allowed (I’m not a fan—placeholders become permanent)
• Whether a PO must map to a cost center/project code

Step 3: Write custom messaging like a runbook

Include:

• The rule (“PO required”)
• The fastest path to compliance (where to request a PO)
• One support contact
• What to do for emergencies (and how those are reviewed later)

Step 4: Instrument the process and track 3 metrics

If you want to prove this improves procurement-to-pay, track:

1. Subscription completion time (before vs after)
2. Exception rate (how often people request bypasses)
3. Allocation accuracy (percentage of Marketplace spend mapped correctly at month close)

Those three numbers tell a clear story to finance and engineering leadership.

People also ask: does requiring POs slow cloud delivery?

Answer first: It can—if your PO process is manual. If your PO creation is automated or fast, mandatory POs usually reduce delays by preventing rework.

The paradox is real: adding a required field feels like friction, but it can speed things up because:

• Buyers don’t have to guess policy
• Finance doesn’t have to chase missing artifacts
• Governance doesn’t have to reconcile purchases after the fact

If your PO cycle time is days, fix that first. Many organizations now auto-generate POs for approved categories or budgets, then reserve manual approvals for edge cases. That’s where AI-assisted procurement routing (triage, classification, exception detection) pays off.

Where this goes next: from POs to intelligent cloud procurement

Mandatory purchase orders and custom messaging in AWS Marketplace are simple changes with a clear direction: cloud buying is becoming more governable without becoming slower.

For teams building AI in supply chain & procurement programs, this is a gift. You get cleaner transaction data, fewer exceptions, and more consistent vendor interaction patterns—exactly what you need to automate forecasting, enforce policy intelligently, and reduce waste.

If you’re evaluating how to modernize cloud procurement governance, start here: turn Marketplace purchases into structured, auditable events. Then ask a bigger question that most companies avoid—what decisions are we still making manually that software could make faster and more consistently?