Ordering NCE Products

The ordering method for purchasing NCE commercial products is the same as the one used for purchasing legacy Office 365 products, and it is described in detail in the KB section Ordering an Office 365 Service . All the business rules that apply now for the legacy products (acceptance of MCA, INN validation, etc.) are also in place for the NCE products.

Ordering via Storefront

Once the NCE commercial products are published to Storefront and their prices are added via the dedicated tool, they are ready for ordering. The NCE products are easily distinguishable from their prefix and suffix, differentiating them visually from the rest of the Microsoft SKUs.

The Add to Basket step looks like this for NCE products:

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• You will notice that there isn’t any add-ons list available on this page since add-ons are not defined as add-ons anymore on our platform. We will explain in the next paragraph the ordering experience for the add-ons.

• All NCE products are available in monthly or annual billing cycles. Moving on with our next versions, we will support both triannual billing cycles and billing frequency options or the annual and triannual cycles. For more information regarding the billing cycles of NCE subscriptions, please check Managing NCE Subscriptions OLD | Billing Cyclesarchived .

Ordering NCE Add-ons

NCE add-ons are now displayed as distinct products, meaning that they are also displayed on the BSS and Storefront as standalone products that have base-subscription dependencies to be purchased. Therefore, those add-ons are not depicted anymore as available add-ons under an overview of an NCE product in Storefront, and additionally, those add-ons (now in the form of a product) have actual NCE products as prerequisites for being purchased.

For the legacy add-ons, the partner applies the add-on to a base-offer subscription after that base subscription has been purchased. In the New Commerce Experience, partners purchase the add-ons from the catalog itself. However, since the NCE add-ons have NCE product prerequisites, users need to ensure that the prerequisite products are met. Otherwise, our system will not allow users to order an NCE add-on without having first purchased at least one of the prerequisite products. During checkout, we check whether the customer has at least one active subscription for one of the prerequisites products, and only then do we allow the user to complete the checkout process. Otherwise, we display the error message “The addon is not purchasable without a compatible base subscription”.

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Enforcing the Minimum & Maximum Number of Seats

When creating a new NCE subscription (or executing an order or checking out an NCE product), a first check is made, on whether the number of seats to be provisioned is within the min and max values allowed for the specific SKU and then a second check is made, whether the number of seats to be provisioned exceeds the maximum amount of seats allowed across tenants (partners).

However, when updating an existing NCE subscription by increasing/decreasing its seats, the only check our system makes is for the min/max quantity allowed per SKU. We do not check the maximum number of seats allowed across tenants.

If a user tries to place an order for an NCE product that has restrictions for the minimum or the maximum number of seats a tenant can purchase, our system will terminate the process by displaying the error message “Item ‘<NCE Product Name>’ supports quantity range between <min quantity> and <max quantity>.”

Ordering via BSS

When it comes to ordering an NCE commercial product via BSS, the available methods are the ones you already know and use for the legacy products:

• Manual creation of a subscription:
  
  

   

• Creation and execution of an order:
  
  

Suppose the BSS user tries to execute an order containing an NCE product (add-on) or create a subscription for the same product without a prerequisite base subscription. In that case, the process is terminated with the error message “The addon is not purchasable without a compatible base subscription”.

Billing NCE Subscriptions

Microsoft NCE subscriptions are charged either monthly or annually, depending on their unit, and they are always aligned with Microsoft billing cycles since we don’t allow any prorated charges. The pricing information imported to the Import New Commerce Experience Product Prices from the official Microsoft Partner Center API call is both the cost prices (i.e., what Microsoft charges you as a CSP) and the retail prices that match the country of the end customer. This means that you have the flexibility to bill your resellers and your customers either by setting a margin above your cost or by defining a discount for Microsoft's retail price, exactly as you do for the legacy Office 365 plans.

Price Protection for NCE Subscriptions

All the NCE subscriptions are created under price protection till the end of their billing cycle, meaning that any price change on the product will not affect the NCE subscription within its billing cycle. A monthly NCE subscriptions gets price protection for one (1) month, whereas an annual NCE subscription gets price protection for twelve (12) months.

In both platforms the NCE subscription is under price protection which is displayed by the green-highlighted sections.

Invoicing NCE Subscriptions

Concerning the invoicing of the NCE subscriptions, we are invoicing the NCE subscriptions typically.

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