New commerce experience for license-based services
Appropriate roles: Admin agent | Sales agent
The new commerce experience for license-based services offers partners more flexibility and capabilities when purchasing and managing products like Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Intune, and other services.
As of September 1, 2024 all license-based subscription purchases will be on New commerce, except for six year or five year public sector legacy offers.
New capabilities
New commerce is less about what partners are purchasing and more about how they're purchasing and managing. Many of the basics remain the same between traditional and new commerce, but new commerce has new capabilities:
More flexibility for managing your services
The new commerce experience offers partners more flexibility for managing services, including the ability to:
- Control subscription renewals
- Upgrade partial seats when moving to new SKUs
- Schedule changes to subscriptions that take effect at the end of terms
There's also new support for enterprise SKU upgrades
New pricing and add-on options
New pricing and add-on options in the new commerce experience include:
- Ability to get pricing for services programmatically through APIs
- More flexibility to acquire add-on services because purchases are no longer dependent on base-offer transactions
- New monthly term options that give partners more flexibility for their businesses
Simplified and enhanced billing
Billing is simplified and enhanced by:
- Consolidating billing and invoicing using the partner's currency
- Making billing dates consistent by basing them on months instead of mid-month dates that can vary across partner tenants
- Supporting monthly, annual, or three-year terms for many subscriptions
- Providing monthly, annual, or up-front billing for many subscriptions
What isn't changing
Many aspects of how partners do business in Partner Center aren't changing with the new commerce experiences. For example, common tasks and workflows that aren't changing include:
- Creating customers
- Requesting relationships with new customers
- Purchasing and managing scenarios for software subscriptions, perpetual software, Azure services, and marketplace offers
Learning about new commerce
Partners now have a choice:
- They can continue to purchase traditional, license-based services.
- They can purchase through the new commerce experience.
Partners who decide to transact with the new commerce services need to become familiar with how the new commerce license-based services work. The following articles in this section explain how to do business using the new commerce offers and subscriptions.
Enhancements and new scenarios
The following scenarios are new or have enhancements to support the new commerce experiences:
- Partners can get pricing for new commerce offers and review the New commerce price sheet APIs
- Purchasing new commerce license-based services using the Partner Center APIs
- Partners can get more information about promotions in new commerce, including Get Promotions and Verify Promotions
- How to configure telco offers with pay-as-you-go overage (E5), including Get overage and update overage
- Add-ons in new commerce
- How to convert mid-term trials or paid SKUs with different quantities, terms, and billing plans. New commerce also supports upgraded SKUs as partial seat upgrades to one target subscription.
Key differences between traditional and new commerce
New commerce offers have new capabilities and flexibility in how partners transact and manage their subscriptions.
Catalog:
The traditional, license-based offers are defined by an offer ID.
In new commerce, offers are defined as product, SKU, and availability (or term).
This new commerce identifier for Partner Center API users is described as a catalogItemId. For more information about the cart line items, see the partner center API documentation.
Pricing:
- Traditional, license-based prices were per currency.
- The new commerce pricing is defined per customer market. A partner who wants pricing for a customer transaction needs to get the price list for the customer's market.
For more information about price lists in new commerce, see the pricing and offers article.
Promotions:
- Traditional, license-based promotions were sometimes implemented as discounts and other times as offers with promo in their name.
- In new commerce, promotions are simplified and applied to the partner price.
For more information about promotions, see New commerce promotions.
Subscription management:
- In new commerce, canceling and reducing subscription licenses is done differently.
- New commerce subscriptions can only be canceled in the first seven days of their term.
For more information about cancellation policies, see Manage customer subscriptions.