Most Microsoft partners sell one slice of a very large catalogue. The Marketplace Builder from xMonthly lets a partner assemble the rest of it, publish it under their own brand on their own domain, and earn on products they have no infrastructure to support alone.
I designed both sides of it: the builder a partner assembles their catalogue in, and the marketplace their clients browse and buy from. When WordPress and available marketplace plugins ran out of road, I built it as a custom plugin instead.
Role
Product designer
Industry
Microsoft partner SaaS
Tools
Claude Code, Stripe, WordPress
Years
2025-2026
The Problem
Microsoft’s catalogue moves faster than the partners selling it. Most know AI is where their clients are heading (and where Microsoft is pushing them), but not enough about Copilot, agents or the licensing underneath to recommend any of it with confidence.
For example, a partner who specializes in Dynamics GP migrations is still the trusted advisor for everything else their client buys. However, they usually watch that revenue go elsewhere because they don’t have the infrastructure behind them to sell, implement or support a product outside their lane.
The partner has a client relationship, but not the catalogue.
What is the Marketplace Builder?
01
A partner builds a catalogue
They pick from the Microsoft catalogue and the third-party ISVs alongside it, then add products and services of their own.
02
It publishes as a storefront under their name
Free on xmonthly.com. Embedded on the partner’s own domain as the premium tier.
03
Clients buy on the page
Stripe runs inside every marketplace. The partner earns, and xMonthly takes a cut of what moves through it.
Anything in that catalogue is something xMonthly can broker training, implementation or support for. So a partner can list a product they have never implemented, because they are not the ones who have to implement it.
Prototyping the Builder into Existence
Versions one and two went to a small group of partners for feedback rather than into live deals. Each one made the limit of the approach obvious, and that limit set the brief for the next version.
Version One
One marketplace, built in WordPress
Built One xMonthly catalogue, assembled from WordPress page tools. A visitor could request a consultation or register interest. Nothing could be bought.
Learned Without payment processing, the catalogue could collect interest but not close anything. Any enquiry it produced still had to become an email thread and a call.
Version Two
Partner marketplaces, built by hand
Built The same WordPress approach, reskinned for two partners. We assembled each catalogue ourselves from the product list they sent over.
Learned Because we assembled them, every edit travelled by call or email. What shipped was a collection of information about products and services, which is not the same as somewhere to buy them.
Version Three
A builder partners run themselves
Built A custom WordPress plugin, built and iterated with Claude Code. WordPress could go no further without a paid third-party marketplace plugin, and the ones available did not do what we needed.
How a Product is Presented
A partner listing a product they have never sold cannot write the page for it. So every product arrives with the page already written, in the same four parts.
01
What it is
One sentence, then four capabilities written as outcomes rather than feature names.
02
See it
An embedded video, so evaluating a product doesn’t depend on reading about it.
03
Who sets it up
The implementation and support services available for that product.
04
What it costs
Licensing tiers with month-to-month, annual billed monthly and annual upfront side by side, and the saving stated as a percentage.
The same three actions sit in the same place in every section. Someone who makes up their mind at the third product knows where to look at the eleventh.
Working Under Another Brand
A partner will not send clients to another company’s website. Hosting a marketplace on xmonthly.com is the standard, free experience, but it always means the client will be visiting somewhere that isn’t the partner’s site. The premium tier puts the marketplace on their own domain.
That feature is made possible by an iframe, coded to resize itself as the content inside it changes. The frame is never shorter than what it holds, so the host page grows instead, the way it would around any other block of its own content.
Thanks to that page height reporting within the iframe, there’s no scrollbar in the embed. Making it feel like the content is native.
The partner can also control accent color, create their own marketplace landing page, and create custom products and services.
Built Between Client Calls
Partners assemble a marketplace in the gaps around other work, across several days, often on a phone. Everything below came out of watching them do it on calls.
Autosave, with save points
Nothing is lost by closing the tab. A partner can also save a point and come back to it.
Drag to reorder
The catalogue leads with whatever the partner leads with, not the order the products were added in.
Preview before publishing
A partner sees the marketplace as a client would before it goes live.
Links to a specific tab
A link can open the product a client asked about, rather than the front page of the marketplace.
Custom products and services
A partner adds their own alongside the Microsoft catalogue, in the same list rather than a section of their own.
A builder that works on a phone
The layout of the builder itself, not only the marketplace it publishes.
Three Power Automate flows run underneath
On completion
A prompt when a build is finished.
On abandonment
A link back to the progress a partner already made.
To admins
A notification either way.
The abandonment flow is the one that matters. A half-built marketplace is a partner who got interrupted, not a partner who said no.
What Partners Made with It
In August, three companies with almost nothing in common each published a marketplace.
A Microsoft partner since 1985
Tresidder Limited
Nine products across Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure, built around the Dynamics GP migration work they have always done.
Family offices only
Accountnet
Business Central with Binary Stream and Truvio, aimed at the multi-entity reporting that financial firms actually need.
Founded 2020
ERP Global Solutions
Business Central and a long list of ERP add-ons, matching a business built on moving companies off legacy systems.
Try the Builder
The builder is live below. It is the same one partners use, running on xMonthly’s site.