Selling through distributors in Canada

What does a distributor do for a vendor?

I've run programs with distributors and their resellers. The short version: a distributor gives you a route to thousands of resellers you'd never sign one by one, and the systems to sell and bill through them.

AWS's description of its own distributors is a good summary. They recruit, onboard and enable resellers, build business plans with them and launch go-to-market activities. AWS backs them with performance incentives and Distributor Development Funds.¹

The big distributors also sell services to vendors. Ingram Micro lists financing, specialized marketing, lifecycle management, and pre-sales and post-sales technical support.²

What a distributor can't do is make a reseller care about you this quarter. That part is marketing, and it usually stays with you. The distributors page shows how I work with vendors and resellers.

What do Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX offer?

They're the broad catalogues. Ingram Micro says it brings products from more than 1,500 vendors to more than 165,000 customers.² TD SYNNEX cites more than 2,500 vendors and over 150,000 customers in more than 100 countries.⁴

Both now sell mostly through their own platforms. Ingram Micro's Xvantage is live in 22 countries, and its CEO says about 75% of revenue in those countries flows through it. Its Intelligent Digital Assistant generated around $1 billion in net revenue in the second quarter of 2026.³

TD SYNNEX has StreamOne for cloud commerce, with white-label storefronts and automated billing, and Channel Academy for Microsoft skills.⁴ Its PartnerFirst platform has more than 65,000 active users. In October 2026 it added AI agents for North American partners that quote, track orders and build reports.⁵

For AWS partners in Canada, TD SYNNEX lists AWS marketing tools, funding programs, and private offers from its vendors that resellers can use on AWS Marketplace.⁶ The AWS Marketplace guide covers selling there from Canada.

On marketing, TD SYNNEX partners get a free portal run by ContentMX, the company that sells the tool. It sends weekly curated vendor content and prebuilt campaigns.⁷ That's reach for a vendor. It's still syndication: the reseller shares your post under its name, next to everyone else's.

What do Pax8 and Sherweb offer MSPs?

Both are built for managed service providers, and both are close to home for a Quebec company.

Pax8 says it reaches more than 47,000 MSPs and 800,000 small businesses.⁸ It has an office in Montreal and a Canadian team with French-speaking staff, and it bills in Canadian dollars.⁹

For vendors, Pax8 offers placement through partner recommendations, co-funded marketing, seller training for partners and shared pipeline reporting. It's curated: vendors apply, join a waitlist and are onboarded by hand.⁸ In October 2026 it announced 8os, a platform for MSPs to govern the AI agents their small business clients use. Pax8 plans general availability early in 2027.¹⁰

Sherweb has been in Quebec's Estrie region for nearly 30 years. It calls itself a cloud distributor and a cloud marketplace, and has more than 7,500 partners in Canada, the US, Ireland and the UK.¹¹ Partners get a control panel for billing and provisioning, and a self-service portal they can brand for their own clients. Sherweb also sells services, from tech support to cybersecurity.¹¹ In March 2026, Investissement Québec put C$125 million into the company.¹²

Where does Arrow fit?

Arrow sells through ArrowSphere, its cloud platform for resellers and MSPs. It turns billing from more than 50 vendors into one format, handles quotes and subscriptions, and gives partners a white-label portal for their own customers. It's deployed in 38 countries.¹³

The ArrowSphere Assistant is built into the platform. Arrow says it helps partners read bills, schedule updates and create marketing campaigns.¹³ If resellers already sell you through Arrow, ask what your campaigns look like in there.

What changed for distributors in 2026?

Microsoft created a Frontier Distributor designation for its cloud solution provider distributors. TD SYNNEX announced it in March 2026,⁴ Ingram Micro in April,¹⁴ and Arrow in June, for EMEA and North America.¹⁵

AWS updated its channel programs from January 1, 2026. For distributors, AWS promised more investment and simpler calculations, aimed at small business and at selling AWS Marketplace solutions.¹⁶

Most of the year's launches were about ordering and AI agents. They help a reseller move faster once it has decided to sell you. They don't make that decision for it.

Will a distributor market my product to resellers?

Some of it, through its programs and paid services. What's left is the reseller's reason to pick you: campaigns it can run under its own name, in English and in French, and funds it will actually claim.

Partners say they need that help. In Omdia research reported by Channel Dive in July 2026, more than half of channel firms said vendors didn't provide adequate marketing resources. Nearly 90% rated marketing activation as critical to their vendor relationships.¹⁷

In Quebec, plan for French from the start. A reseller here can't run an English-only kit. More in Quebec French for partner marketing, and for the funds, see co-op or MDF.