Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Commerce in 2024 release wave 2

Overview

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce is a headless omnichannel retail solution that delivers seamless end-to-end retail scenarios across physical, digital, and call center channels. By combining sales, intelligence, and productivity into a single platform, retailers get an all-encompassing view of their customers. With this view, retailers can provide personalized shopping experiences that lead to loyal customers and higher conversions. The Dynamics 365 Commerce solution enables comprehensive support for fixed point of sale (POS), mobile point of sale (MPOS), call center, digital commerce (direct-to-consumer [DTC], business-to-business [B2B], and B2B for wholesalers), clienteling, merchandising, channel management, cross channel inventory visibility, and order orchestration for efficient, on-time fulfillment.

Through its headless omnichannel retail solution, Dynamics 365 Commerce helps your organization drive better business outcomes and increase conversion rates in the following ways:

• Seamlessly engage with customers across retail channels: Give your customers the option to purchase whenever, however, and wherever they want—on any device—by delivering a frictionless and consistent engagement across physical, digital, and call center channels.
• Modernize and streamline retail store operations: Create personalized and friction-free commerce experiences in-store and in pop-up shops using the modern mobile POS that supports fixed, roaming, endless aisle, and self-checkout modes of operation.
• Gain agility and scalability through a fully integrated, headless omnichannel retail solution: Support traditional and emerging channels by using a natively integrated, agile, API-driven, headless commerce engine that enables seamless cross-channel operations.
• Build your digital commerce presence: Grow your business with an integrated, end-to-end, unified digital commerce solution that supports DTC, B2B, and B2B for wholesaler operations.

Key features for this release include:

• Use Copilot to streamline back-office merchandising activities: Use Copilot to automatically validate assortments, categories, products, and more with proactive alerts that guide you to easy resolutions.
• Use Copilot to efficiently run your retail stores: Use Copilot to augment how you run your retail stores with insightful real-time reporting that tracks and summarizes store performance so you can proactively address issues and take advantage of local trending patterns.
• Use Copilot to boost conversions with assisted selling and clienteling: Use Copilot to provide personalized shopping experiences by giving sales associates product and customer insights to increase customer loyalty and boost customer conversions.
• Enable self-serve checkout and kiosk experiences: Delight your customers with a POS experience that's optimized for quick and intuitive self-serve operations.
• Enable Modern POS experiences: Provide sales associates with improved Store Commerce components and workflows that are optimized for usability and efficiency.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Commerce 2024 release wave 2

Investment areas

AI innovation with Copilot
With Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365, organizations empower their workers with AI tools built for sales, service, marketing, operations, and more. These AI capabilities enable everyone to spend more time on the best parts of their jobs and less time on mundane tasks.

Retailers operate on razor-thin margins and need to maximize the value of every sale. Minimizing the time required to access product and customer information and providing AI-powered sales insights are crucial for improving per-sales margins and increasing customer loyalty. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Commerce Store Commerce point of sale focuses on enhancing sales associate productivity and effectiveness in the checkout flow. It enables associates to access summarized product and customer information with AI-powered insights, actions, and recommendations that are contextually available throughout the interface. Copilot features save sales associates time, increase sales conversions, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Digital commerce
With its responsive React-based web front end and scalable headless retail engine, the Dynamics 365 Commerce digital commerce solution provides quick-to-market websites that enable manufacturers and retailers around the world to sell directly to their wholesalers, other businesses, and consumers.

Promotions play a key role in digital commerce sales conversions. When customers see all available and applicable discounts on a single page, you land more sales with higher per-order values.

Intelligent Order Management
Built on a modern, open platform, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management provides the flexibility companies need to capture orders from any order source, including e-commerce, marketplace, mobile apps, or traditional sources like electronic data interchange (EDI). Companies can fulfill those orders from their own warehouses, third-party logistics (3PL) providers, stores, or drop-ship with vendors or other delivery fulfillment partners by using out-of-the-box prebuilt connectors from an ecosystem of more than 200 Microsoft Power Platform connectors.

Intelligent Order Management leverages an integrated, real-time inventory visibility service, and a microservice built on Microsoft Dataverse that is highly scalable and extensible, providing a single, global view of the inventory positions across systems. Intelligent Order Management also uses distributed order management (DOM) to give real-time recommendations for each order, so you fulfill them accurately and in a more cost-effective manner. This approach improves supply chain efficiency to better meet customer expectations.

With Intelligent Order Management, brand owners get real-time visibility into each step of the order journey. Customizable and integrated dashboards provide fulfillment insights in real time, so the supply chain team can overcome constraints and improve operational efficiency.

Omnichannel commerce
Developed as a modern, cloud-based, software as a service solution, the Dynamics 365 Commerce omnichannel headless retail engine enables scalable retail operations across in-store, call center, and online (business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and indirect business-to-business) sales channels. Each channel supports products, pricing, and promotions. Each channel captures customer and order data that any other sales channel can access.

Merchandisers who define complex pricing structures can use the unified pricing management module to simplify their workflow. Use attribute-based pricing models to configure, simulate, and approve rules-based pricing across products, attributes, channels, and customers.

Store Commerce
Built on a modern omnichannel retail platform, the Dynamics 365 Commerce Store Commerce POS enables retailers to provide fast, efficient, and modern checkout experiences on fixed and mobile devices that operate online or offline. The Store Commerce POS application provides comprehensive retail workflows, from in-store, online, and curbside pickup transactions, to inventory management, order fulfillment, assisted selling, and store operations.

Sales associates spend most of their time engaging with customers and processing orders through the Store Commerce POS. Streaming the checkout workflow to optimize efficiency, standardize payment flows, and provide contextual in-line controls results in time saved on every transaction, leading to more efficient sales associates. Customers who want to skip the queue can instead use Store Commerce's fast and frictionless self-checkout functionality to quickly complete their payment.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Commerce below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Commerce