NCE Promotions
- Panagiotis Papanastasiou
Our platform fully and automatically supports the Microsoft New Commerce Experience (NCE) promotions for both the NCE Commercial and NCE Public Sector product types. These NCE promotions have varying discount amounts and durations.
Informative Custom Fields in BSS for the NCE Subscription Promotions
NCE subscriptions that support promotions continue to have the four extra custom fields in BSS, namely, the Catalog Offer ID, the Promotion End Date, the Promotion ID, and the Discount as a visual reference to the respective promotion of applicable NCE subscriptions.
Informative Custom Fields in Storefront for the NCE Subscription Promotions
There are another four systemic custom fields available for viewing the promotion details for every NCE subscription that has a promotion in Storefront and those fields can be displayed on the subscription view page, under the Details section. The following simple guide located on the page Publish Subscription's Promotion Details to the Storefront explains the steps of enabling and publishing those fields.
Promotions Overview
Microsoft made available the Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platforms promotions in the new commerce experience for many triennial, annual, and monthly term products.
Partners can discover promotions by visiting the Global Promo Readiness Guide, calling the getPromotions API, or browsing the Partner Center catalog. Products with available promotions show a “Promotions available” link allowing the partner to get the details for the promotion. The Global Promo Readiness Guide is updated monthly if any new promotions are introduced. Therefore, the aforementioned resources can be used to understand the availability and eligibility of the promotions.
Applicable promotions do not impact the wholesale partner margin percentage. 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 triennial(limitations to triennial promotions apply). Also, promotions are individually applied to both primary product offers and add-ons (products).
How NCE Promotion Discounts Are Applied
NCE promotional discounts are applied to certain NCE products whether you have an assigned BSS price list or not. With the following three (sample) scenarios, you can better understand how the NCE promotional discounts are applied.
Scenarios Description | Prices from MS Pricing Excel & Promotion details | Final Application of Promo Prices |
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#1 - When the price list has a rule of 10% markup. | Microsoft Prices: We retrieve product’s cost and SRP price from the pricing excel Microsoft has published for the end customer’s country . Suppose the customer is billed in USD currency: Microsoft Promotion: Microsoft offers a 5% discount promotion for this NCE product. | We apply the discount to the CSP cost price for calculating the unit cost and then we apply the price list markup for calculating the unit price.
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#2 - When the price list has a rule of 7% discount to the sell price. | We apply the discount to the CSP cost price for calculating the unit cost and then we apply the price list discount to the discounted SRP Price for calculating the unit price.
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#3 - When there is no price list. | We apply the discount to the CSP cost price for calculating the unit cost and then we apply the promotion discount to the SRP Price for calculating the unit price:
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NCE Subscriptions Under Promotion in BSS
For NCE subscriptions, Microsoft has applied promotions since 10/01/21, and we also have them implemented in our systems. When purchasing a new NCE subscription, the promotion price is imposed automatically on the NCE subscription on our system. For your reference, we have also embedded in each NCE subscription view page in BSS four custom promotion fields that display relative promotion information that is applied to the subscription. For the four custom promotion fields to appear under an NCE subscription in BSS, you have to run first 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.
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 can purchase the specific NCE subscription with no promotion applied to it.
Therefore, when a promotion is applied to an NCE subscription, the Unit Price field displays the Microsoft price containing the applied promotion.
You may have also noticed that the subscription is under price protection in the above screenshot. Please proceed to the Ordering & Billing NCE Products | Price Protection for NCE Subscriptions page for more information.
Automatically & Non-Automatically Applied Promotions to Triennial NCE Subscriptions
There are two kinds of promotions for triennial NCE subscriptions right now. The first one is called Auto-Applied Promotions, and the second one is called Non-Auto-Applied Promotions. More specifically:
1. Auto-Applied Promotions: These promotions are applied automatically to triennial NCE subscriptions (based on the customer’s eligibility) since they are retrieved automatically by the pricing mechanism of the Microsoft Service Manager instance. A product that may receive such an automatically applied promotion is the: Microsoft Teams Premium - CFQ7TTC0RM8K:0002.
2. Non-Auto-Applied Promotions: These promotions are not automatically applied to triennial NCE subscriptions. Therefore, they require from the BSS user to import them manually to the platform. Since we are currently working hard to make the Import Customers Tool (Product Importer) able to manage those kinds of promotion imports, we do not allow the purchase of triennial NCE products with non-automatically applied promotions, since we cannot currently provide the user with the option to apply a non-automatically applied promotion which results in losing the promotion altogether. Therefore, the workaround via the use of the Import Customers Tool, will be provided to you in the shortest of time via one of the upcoming releases.
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 appears 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.
If a product is not found on the respective country pricelist, an error appears.