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 licenses 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:
- Get pricing for services programmatically through APIs.
- Enjoy more flexibility in acquiring add-on services because purchases are no longer dependent on base-offer transactions.
- Use the new monthly term options that give partners more flexibility for their businesses.
Simplified and enhanced billing
Simplified and enhanced billing in the new commerce experience include:
- Consolidate billing and invoicing by using the partner's currency.
- Make billing dates consistent by basing them on months instead of mid-month dates that can vary across partner tenants.
- Support monthly, annual, or three-year terms for many subscriptions.
- Provide 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:
- Create customers.
- Request relationships with new customers.
- Purchase and manage scenarios for software subscriptions, perpetual software, Azure services, and marketplace offers.
Learn 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 familiarize themselves 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:
- Get pricing for new commerce offers and review the New commerce price sheet APIs.
- Purchase new commerce license-based services by using the Partner Center APIs.
- Get more information about promotions in new commerce, including Get Promotions and Verify Promotions.
- Configure telco offers with pay-as-you-go overage (E5), including Get overage and update overage.
- Use add-ons in new commerce.
- Convert mid-term trials or paid SKUs with different quantities, terms, and billing plans. New commerce also supports upgraded SKUs as partial license 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.
The new commerce offers are defined as product, SKU, and availability (or term).
The 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:
- The 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:
- The traditional, license-based promotions were sometimes implemented as discounts and other times as offers with promo in their name.
- The new commerce promotions are simplified and applied to the partner price.
For more information about promotions, see New commerce promotions.
Subscription management:
- The new commerce canceling and reducing subscription licenses is done differently.
- The 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.