Supply chain | Supply Chain Management, Commerce

License inquiry E-commerce Tiers with External E-commerce

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Posted on by Mordechai.Ko

Hi all,

I'm supporting a retail customer with license budgeting for 2023. The customer in question is using an external E-commerce platform and has the ambition to integrate towards the Headless Commerce API to create and sync Sales orders through retail server. I looked into the Commerce licensing that are associated to enabling this and were suprised when I saw the setup and pricing associated to E-commerce tiers.

I reached out to the local Microsoft sales organization just to confirm that the customer needs to purchase these licenses even though they won't use the native Microsoft B2B/B2C solution, and they confirmed that this is needed just to channel the transactions through retail server, this would in turn eat up 3-7% of all revenue from the to-be online channel and also comes with a great margin of error, since you commit to the amount of transactions channeled through Retail server and the respective gross merchandise value bracket for those transactions.

I was surprised I didn't find anyone else who have been discussing this on the forum, the customer ideally would want to follow this integration pattern but with the calculated cost, it's hard for them to defend when they are already paying for the external E-commerce platform. I have reviewed the license guides with the latest from August, it doesn't mention any specifics.

Have you had similar findings related to this license in dialogue with customers, or are you a customer with similar challenges? Would be great to get some insight on if someone has had any other response from Sales organizations or if you've opted for another integration pattern for syncing sales order as a result of this license.

Best regards,

Mordechai Ko

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Shafeeque P. 6,509 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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RE: License inquiry E-commerce Tiers with External E-commerce

If you simply want to use headless commerce just for syncing the orders and don't intend on using the pricing engine, tax engine and other functionalities of headless commerce. I would recommend to integrate the 3rd e-Commerce directly with D365 FnO using data entities.
P Jackson 1,611 on at

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RE: License inquiry E-commerce Tiers with External E-commerce

Unfortunately, yes, Microsoft are pricing out of the Market the smaller customers and only aiming their product are Enterprise size sites.
JeevanG 390 on at

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RE: License inquiry E-commerce Tiers with External E-commerce

Hi Mordechai,

Another option would to be use ISV integration accelerators which integrates into D365 commerce directly without the headless commerce APIs. One such that we have used in the past is the Hitachi solutions OMS accelerator. Thanks
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Shafeeque P. 6,509 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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RE: License inquiry E-commerce Tiers with External E-commerce

I went through the latest licensing guide. If i understand correct, this licensing requirement is only there if you want to use Commerce Scale Unit in Cloud(hosted, monitored and owned by MS) for 3rd party e-commerce. One work around I would try is to, install a self hosted Cloud scale unit in a Cloud VM and use that as the backend for your E-commerce. I have been using this model (Installing Self hosted CSU in Cloud VM) for our physical stores and the performance is very good and able to scale it well based on our requirement.

Note: Rating and Reviews and Media management will not be available in this model and you will have to manage that in the external commerce itself.

If this helped you, I'd appreciate it if you'd mark this as a Verified Answer, which may in turn help others as well.
Mordechai.Koo 5 on at

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RE: License inquiry E-commerce Tiers with External E-commerce

Hi Charlotte!

As mentioned, I have already been in contact with the Sales team at MS related to this, I have gotten a response stating that this license is required but the dialogue has overall been very unclear. As it poses a great challenge to my client, I would assume it does to other clients and partners as well, so it would be interesting to hear from their perspective, if they've received other information from MS or if they've decided to take another route in relation to using the Retail server for Order synchronization or not.
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Charlotte X on at

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RE: License inquiry E-commerce Tiers with External E-commerce

Hi Mordechai.Ko,

Sorry I'm not an expert in this area, you can submit a support incident to Microsoft Dynamics Team or wait for someone experienced in this area to answer this question.

Best Regards,

Charlotte