Promotions Overview

Microsoft made available the Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platforms promotions in the new commerce experience for many annual and monthly term products.

Partners can discover promotions by visiting the Global Promo Readiness Guide, by calling the getPromotions API, or by browsing the Partner Center catalog. Products with available promotions will show a “Promotions available” link allowing the partner to get the details for the promotion. The Global Promo Readiness Guide will be updated monthly if any new promotions are introduced. Therefore, the aforementioned resources can be used to understand the availability and eligibility of the promotions.

The wholesale partner margin percentage will not be impacted by applicable promotions. Incentives are earned based on wholesale pricing net of discounts or promotions.

Supported Promotions

Microsoft supports the new commerce promotions that can be implemented as a percentage off of a given NCE subscription, be that monthly, annual, or multi-year. Also, promotions will be individually applied to both primary product offers and add-ons (products).

NCE Subscriptions Under Promotion in BSS

For NCE subscriptions, promotions are applied by Microsoft since 10/01/21 and we are currently working hard to have them implemented in our systems as well. For now, when purchasing a new NCE subscription, the promotion price is not imposed on the NCE subscription on our system but the subscription gets created with the pricing of the respective NCE product - with no promotion applied to it.

In order to overcome the pricing discrepancy between Microsoft and our systems, the user can view on BSS four custom fields containing promotion details and then opt to manually edit the pricing of the respective NCE subscription, based on that information.

For the four custom promotion fields to appear under an NCE subscription in BSS, you have to first run the Get Services Definition from the Microsoft Cloud Services instance, located under BSS Setup > Administration > System Options > Applications Setup > Microsoft Cloud Services, and click on the Settings button.

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More specifically we have introduced the following four promotion details custom fields:

• Catalog Offer ID: Is the identification code of the offer for the specific NCE subscription as it derives from Microsoft.

• Promotion ID: Is the identification code of the promotion as it derives from Microsoft.

• Promotion Discount ( % ): Is the discount applied to the specific customer for the specific NCE product and the specific term (Jan '22: 16.7% for monthly offers till June '22 & 5% for annual offers till March '22).

• Promotion End Date: Is the date that the specific promotion ends. After this date, the customer will purchase the specific NCE subscription with no promotion applied to it.

You may have also noticed that in the above screenshot the subscription is under price protection. For more information concerning to the please proceed to the Ordering & Billing NCE Products OLD | Price Protection for NCE Subscriptionsarchived page.

Adding Promotions to Eligible NCE Subscriptions

We are offering three workarounds (until our full implementation in our systems) for getting the correct pricing (via the four aforementioned custom fields containing the promotion details) and manually adding the promotions to the eligible NCE subscriptions:

1. Create a price list using a specific percentage discount on all NCE products with annual billing term (e.g. 5% discount, check specifics on Microsoft Partner Center).
   OR

2. Change the pricing (of cost and sell price) for all NCE products for the annual billing term into a reduced price (reduced by the promotion discount) so that upon purchasing them, the subscriptions have the correct pricing from scratch. In order to do so collectively, the BSS user can use the product importer.
   OR

3. Create a report containing all the NCE subscriptions whose Promotion ID field is not blank. Include all the promotion details custom fields in the report and find out the promotion discount that should be applied on each NCE subscription. Then edit the pricing of these subscriptions respectively.

   1. Create a new report in BSS by navigating to Reports > Reports and clicking on the New Report button.

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   2. On the first step of the report, choose as basic data type the Subscriptions option, and click on the Next Step button.

       

   3. On the second step of the reports, click on the Display More Fields option and from there locate and select the New Commerce product type.

      After you have selected the New Commerce product type, you you can enable all the checkboxes, that are highlighted in black color, on the screenshot above.
      Once you have finished with the selected checkboxes, you can proceed towards the third step of the report by clicking on the Next Step button.
      
      

   4. On the second step of the reports, you must create the following two criteria:

      • Column = Product Type, Operator = is equal to, Value = Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce)

      • Column = Promotion ID, Operator = is different from, Value = (just leave the value empty… don’t add a space)
        Lastly, the Rule must indicate the 1 AND 2 value.
        
        
        

   5. Once the criteria are set, you can go directly to the fifth and last step of the report in order to watch the results and export them, as per the following example.

Errors while Ordering NCE Subscriptions Under Promotion With Quantity Restrictions

If the Storefront or BSS user tries to checkout an NCE product or execute an order, respectively, containing an NCE product with restrictions on minimum/maximum quantity of promotion seats, an error message appears stating:

“The provided quantity does not satisfy the minimum or maximum seat requirements for the promotion.(Available seats for promotion: <availableSeats>)"

The same error will appear when the user tries to increase or decrease the seats of an NCE subscription under a promotion that is outside the seat number restrictions imposed by Microsoft.

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