How Amazon Marketplace treats developers. Our horror story!

Marketplaces and App Stores are great places to get your product in front of the customers. Google play and iTunes store are excellent examples, but sometimes this can turn into a nightmare for a developer. In our case it did. As we found Amazon Marketplace is not very pleased with an idea that its customers might save thousands on monthly bills with a new product and doesn’t approve nor rejects a product for 5 months in a row. Here is the story.

Our startup Clickberry has built a product called Clickberry Video Encoder. We’ve built it to help our customers and partners to save money on video transcoding. As a startup, we were trying to be lean and were trying to save on anything, especially on monthly bills for video transcoding. We had lots of computers and own servers that we were not using, so we thought, why don’t we use them to add some processing power to cloud we use to save on processing costs? You might remember a once well-known project SETI @ home. A distributed network of home computers making massive calculations transcribing the signal of a radio-telescope. We have applied the same approach to making an elastic, distributed system that can use a cloud as a core and a service bus for video transcoding with distributing some parts of it to other platforms, standalone computers and servers, all at scale. No need to say that this saved us thousands on monthly bills.

We submitted the product to AWS Marketplace and started waiting for approval. We were very excited, and our customers were waiting for the product to become available on AWS. But the approval process has been taking forever. Support was shooting generic auto-replies at us, like “your request is very important to us, we’ll have a look when we have time”. The business rolls down the hill, investors are unhappy, customers are waiting, and whatever we were saying to the Marketplace, they kept sending us “your request is very important to us” replies for 5 months in a row.

We were very persistent, but it didn’t help much. One day we got a reply that there is nothing they can do until their “Chief Architect” will have a look at the product. Good, we said: “Big boss will have a look at our product finally”. Stupid we were. Then 4 more weeks passed, then 8 more. Nothing happened. Is a big boss at Amazon has no other things to do but to look at our small product for 5 months? Isn’t it strange?

Well…some strange ideas started showing up in our heads as our business was suffering from this delay and our investors became more and more unhappy. Why does it take 5 month for Amazon to approve a simple product like this? Might be there another reason for not getting approval? The product wasn’t violating any rules or guidelines, so there was no reason to reject it. The main goal of the product is to help companies who use AWS, and transcode lots of video, to reduce their costs and monthly bills. Might that be the reason why Amazon doesn’t want to approve the product but yet has no official reason to decline it?

One of the last email we sent (in January) was saying:

“Can you please advise us on the current status of our application? We’ve been trying to get approved for 4 months now. Is there anything we can do speed up the process. Our clients are waiting for the product and our investors are getting upset with us not being able to launch it. For us, as a startup, timing is a very important metric. Can you please help us? Thank you in advance.”

Do I need to say that the reply we got was the same as for the last 5 months: 
 
 ” I’ll make sure that our Solutions Architect can review this ASAP, and get back to you with any feedback.”

Amazon, what is going on? Why a simple product needs 5 months to get to the store? Are you blocking us? What is the reason? Is there a situation when a mosquito threatens a business of an elephant? What if Amazon simply doesn’t want its customers to save on video transcoding costs? We do not see any other reasons why it should 5 months for a simple product to be approved on AWS.

Despite all said, AWS is still a fantastic platform. Its marketplace is also a great option for developers to get their products in front of the customers. We’ll continue to try to get to AWS Marketplace, though it all smells fishy:(