New Commerce Experience (NCE)

Hybr has added a set of features and changes in Marketplace and Billing for Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs) to support a new commerce experience in Microsoft Partner Center

Marketplace

• New Commerce offers to be listed under the Cloud Services area of Marketplace a.k.a Service Catalog

  • Price sheet for the NCE to be uploaded in Hybr Billing for the end customers to see the cost for the offers

  • Cost for the offer to be shown in the wizard after selecting Term Duration and Billing Plan

Purchase Wizard for New Commerce Experience Offer

• In line with the Partner Center restrictions on cancellation and license count reduction for NCE subscriptions, those operations are allowed only for 72 hours from the initial purchase from Hybr.

• New Commerce Experience resources to be billed under the service type 'NCECSPOnlineService' in Hybr Billing; this will reflect in Invoices, Usage History, and other reports.

Billing

• The cost for the end customers will be calculated based on the invoice Microsoft generates for the Partner and reseller margin defined in Hybr. Value of reseller margin can be changed through Application Settings in Billing, Key: CSPNCELicenseResellerMarginPercent. Steps to make Application Settings change can be found here.

• Cost calculation from Microsoft Invoice for Partners is recommended. If you have any use cases to have the cost calculated based on the Pricing Profile, the following application settings need to be changed in Billing. CalculateMeteredCostForNCELicenseSubscription should set to ‘true’ and CSPNCELicenseResellerMarginPercent should be set to 0.

• To learn more details on the cost calculation for NCE subscriptions, refer to the below links.

  • Common billing scenarios for CSP program partners working in Partner Center

  • Sample monthly billing scenarios for new subscriptions, changing license amounts, or suspensions

  • Common annual billing scenarios in Partner Center

FAQs

How to disable legacy offers to be disabled for purchase?

You can control whether legacy offers are to be displayed for purchase in the CSP Marketplace / Service Catalog through Application Settings. Use the configuration 'IsHideCspLegacyOffers' to under the Billing -> Features to control the display.

How to control the billing cycles for the customers?

To control the billing cycles available for end customers, use the application setting 'AllowedTermAndBillingCycle'. The default value for the setting to be,

{"P1M":["Monthly"],"P1Y":["Monthly","Annual"],"P3Y":["Monthly","Annual","Triennial"],"OneTime":["one_time"],"None":["None"]}

For Example, to remove ‘Monthly’ Billing cycle from 'Annual’ Term while purchase, setting to be modified as below

{"P1M":["Monthly"],"P1Y":["Annual"],"P3Y":["Monthly","Annual","Triennial"],"OneTime":["one_time"],"None":["None"]}

How to differentiate NCE / Legacy subscriptions for the customers?

You can choose to display tags for NCE or Legacy subscriptions. To enable tags for NCE subscriptions, specify the tag value in Application Settings for Billing -> Csp -> "NewCommerceExperienceTagValue". If this is empty, no value is shown in the UI for NCE subscriptions.

To enable tags for legacy subscription, specify the value in Application Settings for Billing -> Csp -> "LegacySubscriptionTagValue".

NCE subscriptions with Tags in Hybr

Known Issues

• Duplicate entries in Partner Center Pricing Sheet: Some of the Pricing Sheet downloaded from Microsoft Partner Center has duplicate entries, thus resulting in errors and causing Pricing issues in Marketplace and during billing. Please get in touch with Cloud Assert support to ensure there are no duplicates in the NCE Pricing Profile after the Price sheet is uploaded. Work to skip duplicate entries while uploading the Pricing sheet is in progress and will be delivered in the next release.

• When transactions (License addition, removal, etc.,) occur between the beginning of the month and the invoice generation date (Microsoft Invoice for the Partner), the Partner Center billing system adds the transaction to the previous billing month. This is to be fixed by Microsoft and expected to be completed by end of March as per the timeline shared by Microsoft.