What’s new — and of note — in Dynamics 365 Commerce

Written by: Tyler Barron, VP Client Solutions

Online and off, commerce changes faster than just about any other market or market segment. Retail selling, inventory management, POS systems, the customer experience… new developments occur almost daily across every part of the space.

Dynamics 365 Commerce keeps up with these developments with every release wave. In this document, we highlight new features from recent releases we’re excited about and that we think will benefit our clients.

For questions on any recent release or help updating D365 Commerce, simply contact us.

Create Purchase Orders from POS 

Clients can streamline and consolidate tools and processes used to create purchase orders by enabling this feature. Say goodbye to having to use multiple tools, and make the Dynamics 365 POS app the single means for employees to handle the end-to-end purchase order business processes. With this feature, you can:

• Create purchase order requests in POS
• View purchase orders requests in POS
• Edit purchase order requests in POS
• Confirm purchase order requests in POS

Find missing and invalid configurations for products, categories, and attributes

Improve downstream selling by reducing upstream errors. The channel merchandising configuration validator will find and help fix incorrect and missing configurations for products, categories, and attributes before they cause issues. Baked into D365 Commerce version 10.0.32*, the validator:

• Proactively finds missing and invalid merchandising configurations such as products, categories, variants, attributes, and catalog.
• Provides validation across all locales for all assorted products and catalogs for a channel.
• Forms deep links to help fix the invalid configurations it discovers.
• Offers a comprehensive set of validation rules (more than 40 rules).

* Not sure what version you’re on? Contact us.

Enable Google Pay AND Apple Pay with Dynamics 365 Payment Connector for Adyen

Empower customers to pay how they want with new payment connectors for both Google Pay and Apple Pay. Dynamics 365 Commerce now provides support for Google Pay and Apple pay through the native Dynamics 365 Payment Connector for Adyen for both point of sale (POS) and e-commerce checkouts.

Google Pay customers will have the option to pre-populate checkout forms with their Google Pay account information, and Apple Pay customers can checkout and choose order details from within the Apple Pay experience.

You’ll save customers time, improving their experience, and save yourself time, improving productivity. For retail sales businesses, this one is a no-brainer!

Order on behalf of a B2B buyer

Improve the buying experience by essentially removing it altogether! This new functionality enables account managers to sign in to B2B e-commerce websites on behalf of buyers they work with. It’s especially helpful in cases where an account manager may receive orders from buyers offline (via the phone, at an event, etc.) and can then place those orders without having to bother buyers again.

Detect POS network and connectivity issues with health check

Downtime in retail almost always means losing a sale. But with this updated “health checks” in D365 Commerce POS apps, sales associates, managers, and IT staff have proactive information required to to diagnose and resolve network and connectivity issues. The health check include specific tests, such as:

• Network latency test: Measures the latency between the POS terminal and the Commerce Sale Unit (CSU) it’s connected to.
• Memory usage test: Determines how much RAM the POS is consuming currently and tracks how it changes over time.
• Retail server connectivity: Confirms that the POS terminal can communicate with Retail Server and the channel database.

The health check capabilities can be accessed directly from the Settings page in the POS.

Generate product enrichment content for e-commerce sites with Copilot

A faster, easier way to engage customers with your products by leveraging AI. With Copilot, you can automatically generate persuasive, compelling, and engaging product and marketing content for -ecommerce websites. This content can also help with search engine results as it’s optimized to rank highly. Additionally, content can be crafted to both match your brand’s tonality and to meet specific market segments. (Note that his feature is in preview as of July 2023 and may not yet be available for general use.)

Use integrated omnichannel media management features

Media assets—such as product images—are a critical component in both online and brick and mortar retail. With Dynamics 365 Commerce integrated omnichannel media management feature, they’re now easier to access and manage. The feature streamlines merchandising by placing assets directly where merchandising occurs in D365 Commerce workflows: no more leaving a process the secure the proper asset—it (along with associated meta data, video, etc.) is right where you need it. (Note that his feature is in preview as of July 2023 and may not yet be available for general use.)

Some honorable mentions

While the features detailed above are our cherry-picked favorites, there are a few more that caught our attention, such as:

• Ecommerce/Site builder:
  • Can remove/ add guest checkout
  • Enable single payment authorization at checkout
    • Payments in Commerce storefront checkout have been refactored so that they require only a single request.
    • This single request performs all the necessary functions that are related to payment processing:
  • Enable advanced error message at checkout
    • More digestible error codes that customers can understand.
  • Compare products capability
    • Product comparison functionality lets shoppers compare product details on a product comparison page to help them make better purchase decisions.
  • Show tax break up in checkout summary
    • Businesses in some legal entities may include sales tax in their prices. In that scenario, businesses can show the tax breakdown by extracting the tax portion from prices and charges or hide the tax breakdown. This feature allows businesses to organize the order summary in the e-commerce channel to meet the business requirements that apply to prices including sale tax.

   

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