Very Poor and Risky Experience with AWS Data Exchange
December 03, 2022

Very Poor and Risky Experience with AWS Data Exchange

Ike Bennion | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AWS Data Exchange

We wanted to use AWS Data Exchange to list, sell and deliver our dataset in the open market. We have roughly 22 datasets that cover specific topical areas and industries. We update these sets on a monthly or quarterly basis depending on the data.
  • Allow you to make private transactions of data
  • Organize your datasets
  • Provide custom legal data services agreements
  • Poor transparency for sellers
  • Little verification of accounts requesting subscriptions
  • Confusing, buggy and misleading UX
  • Very poor development focus, roadmap and investment in the product
  • Bad experience for buyers of the data
  • Poor account service
  • AWS Data Exchange required a lot of time to setup and was hard to QA
  • We have had a lot of traffic flow to ADX with no conversion.
  • We had bad transactions because of compromised accounts, but AWS doesn't provide sellers with enough information/verification to trust subscription request
  • Buggy user experience so there have been erroneous details about our listings
  • Confusing documentation that is often not detailed enough or erroneous

Do you think AWS Data Exchange delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with AWS Data Exchange's feature set?

No

Did AWS Data Exchange live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of AWS Data Exchange go as expected?

No

Would you buy AWS Data Exchange again?

No

  • If you have a small number of institutions you know well that you want to deliver data to securely, AWS could be a solution for you.
  • If you want to sell or provide visibility of your data, you could create a product page and then do your best to take the transaction off-exchange.

AWS Data Exchange Feature Ratings

Connect to traditional data sources
7
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL
Not Rated
Simple transformations
Not Rated
Complex transformations
Not Rated
Not Rated
Data model creation
Not Rated
Metadata management
Not Rated
Business rules and workflow
Not Rated
Collaboration
Not Rated
Testing and debugging
Not Rated
Integration with data quality tools
Not Rated
Integration with MDM tools
Not Rated

Using AWS Data Exchange

3 - We have engineering, product and marketing who are involved with the AWS Data Exchange.
1 - Basic skills but the administration of the system is time intensive.
  • Data delivery
  • Payment processing
  • Marketing and advertising
There have been a lot of problems with ADX. First, the entire system is incredibly clunky from beginning to end.First, by AWS's own admission they're missing a lot of "tablestakes functionality" like the ability to see who is coming to your pages, more flexibility to edit and update your listings, the ability to create a storefront or catalog that actually tries to sell your products. All-in-all you're flying completely blind with AWS. In our convos with other sellers we strongly believe very little organic traffic is flowing through the AWS exchange. For the headache, it's not worth the time or the effort. It's very difficult to market or sell your products.We've also had a number of simple UX bugs where they just don't accurately reflect the attributes of your product. For instance for an S3 bucket they had "+metered costs" displayed to one of our buyers in the price. This of course caused a lot of confusion. They also misrepresented the historical revisions that were available in our product sets because of another UX bug. It's difficult to know what other things in the UX are also broken and incongruent.We also did have a purchase, but the seller is completely at their whim at providing you fake emails, fake company names, fake use cases because AWS hasn't thought through simple workflows like "why even have subscription confirmation if I can fake literally everything about a subscription request." So as a result we're now in an endless, timewasting, unhelpful thread with AWS support trying to get payment. They're confused of what to do and we feel completely lost.Lastly, the AWS team has been abysmal in addressing our concerns. Conversations with them result in a laundry list of excuses of why simple functionalities are so hard (including just having accurate documentation). It was a very frustrating and unproductive call. Our objective of our call was to help us see that ADX is a well-resourced and well-visioned product. Ultimately they couldn't clearly articulate who they built the exchange for both on the seller side and the buyer side.Don't waste your time. This is at best a very foggy experiment. Look at other sellers, they have a lot of free pages to try to get attention, but then have smart tactics to divert transactions away from the ADX. Ultimately, smart move. Why give 8-10% of your cut to a product that is basically bare-bones infrastructure.