Promotions for Microsoft 365 NCE Plans

Microsoft has introduced special promotions to boost adoption of the new commerce experience (NCE) program.

Starting from CloudBlue Commerce 21.4, users can benefit from discounts and promotional pricing offered by Microsoft for their NCE program. During checkout, CloudBlue Commerce checks with Microsoft whether the purchase is eligible for promotional discounts. If eligible, the prices are reduced in the shopping cart and a subscription is sold at a discount. The promotional discount is transparently applied throughout the entire distribution chain, from providers to resellers, and from resellers to customers.

Note: When browsing a catalog, resellers see the regular prices because the system does not detect whether a particular purchase is eligible for a promotion. The information about the NCE promotion availability must be delivered to resellers by other means: through emails, banners, pop-up notifications, and various training.

How the NCE promotion functionality works

Important: This functionality only works for Microsoft 365 NCE service plans created through the Product Lifecycle Management component.

When ordering a plan through the Marketplace, the wizard collects information about a reseller to detect whether their purchase is eligible for promotional discounts.

Note: On the first step of the checkout process, resellers see the regular prices because the system does not immediately detect whether a particular purchase is eligible for a promotion.

On the final step of the checkout process, during order confirmation, the system has all the required information from Microsoft to decide whether the promotion will be applied or not. As a result, a reseller sees the reduced price on the last step. This is the real price they will pay for this purchase and subscription.

Compatibility with other BSS marketing functionalities

If a reseller or customer is set up to receive an additional discount (not a promotion), this discount will be applied on top of the already reduced price, further reducing it.
If a reseller or customer is set up to receive a promotion (not a discount), this promotion overrides the NCE promotion and is applied on top of the regular price.
If a purchase is made with Special Pricing provided during checkout, this special price is applied to the sales order and to the subscription, overriding both the regular price and the NCE promotion.

Known limitations

Classic Rating is out of scope, only new Rating Engine is supported.
The NCE promotion is not applied to a subscription if a Special Pricing or Deal Pricing for any product in the sales order was specified at the same time.
The O365 Connector must always provide the nce_promo_draft and nce_promo_final parameter values. If no promotions can be applied, an empty list of promotions is expected in the parameter value.
Any change order that changes a subscription plan or period will result in the NCE promotion to be discarded from a subscription.
The Tiered and Volume pricing model is not supported.

How to enable the NCE promotion functionality

Important: This functionality is enabled system-wide by the support team.

Dependencies

The following components must be installed:

BSS 21.4 or later,
UX1 Marketplace 6.3 or later,
Rating Engine 1.8 or later,
PLM 1.1 or later.

Enablement

To enable this functionality, complete the following steps:

Enable the following special feature in the Billing database: FEA_NCE_PROMO.

Note: If you wish NCE promotions to re-apply on subscription renewal using the promotion end date obtained from Microsoft, enable this feature additionally: FEA_NCE_PROMO_END_DATE.
Store a Public Key required for the signature verification in the GlobalConf table of the BSS database. You can find this key here, or apply to the respective support team, if you cannot access this page.
```
INSERT INTO "GlobalConf" ("ParamName", "ParamValue") values ('NCE_PUBLIC_KEY', '-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY----- ... -----END PUBLIC KEY-----');
```
(Optional) If the signature verification is not required (for example, for troubleshooting purposes), you can disable it with the following parameter in GlobalConf:
```
INSERT INTO "GlobalConf" ("ParamName", "ParamValue") values ('NCE_SKIP_SIGNATURE_VERIFICATION', 'true');
```
Restart the BSS application.

Changing Applicability of NCE Promotions to End customers

By default, NCE promotions apply to resellers and end customers. You can change this behavior system-wide so that end customers do not receive this kind of promotions. Complete these steps to disable NCE promotions applicability to end customers:

Connect to the BSS database.

Add the configuration parameter to the GlobalConf table:

INSERT INTO "GlobalConf" ("ParamName", "ParamValue") values ('NCE_APPLY_PROMO_TO_END_CUSTOMER', 'FALSE');

After that, new NCE promotions will no longer be applicable to end customers. However, existing subscriptions will not be affected by that change.