Commerce headquarters
The Commerce headquarters component provides administrative capabilities that enable the centralized configuration of products, employees, inventory management, pricing, and other business functionalities. It is also the application that call center workers use to provide assisted Commerce-related workflows.
Commerce Headquarters has a role-based access, so users are fully authenticated through Microsoft Entra ID when they access the solution. Commerce headquarters provides a range of dashboards that expose workspaces, allowing retailers to interact with the data and the system, and to create new entities. You can create channels, manage employees, manage merchandising, and create products, pricing discounts, and promotions. You can centralize all your inventory management in one place and see your inventory across a range of warehouses. You also have access to Power BI reporting capabilities and call center capabilities.
The following sections describe the characteristics that are common of the Commerce Headquarters component.
Centralized omnichannel management
Commerce allows you to have multiple channels in the system, and it hosts all three types of Commerce channels:
- Retail stores for Store Commerce
- e-Commerce for the digital Commerce capabilities
- Call center interactions.
Each channel can have its own unique configuration, offering greater flexibility of the solution.
For example, a retailer might want to direct customers to the brick-and-mortar stores, so they could offer a 30 percent, in-store only discount type of campaign and effectively associate that with a specific retail channel.
In another example, the retailer might want to incentivize moving out certain stock only through the online channel by offering a 50 percent discount that can be linked to the online channel only.
Another example of varying configuration for each channel can be having different types of visual features for the point of sale system. This approach enables the retailer to have a certain visual style for Store Commerce and have it configured and customized for their specific business.
All the configuration is done through templates, which are visually developed in Commerce headquarters.
Employee management
Commerce lets you perform the following employee management functions:
- Create entities for jobs, positions, and workers
- Assign workers to more than one store
- Configure different language settings for each user and user-based Store Commerce screen layouts
- Limit the list of allowed operations
Additionally, you can configure the Store Commerce permission groups to associate different employees with different roles. The task management feature offers productivity enhancements for employees at the stores, where task lists can be assigned by the system.
Merchandising
With Commerce, you can create cross-legal entity product hierarchies for merchandising, procurement, channel navigation, and supplemental hierarchies. It provides extensive product information management, giving you the ability to:
- Create product masters, service items, and kits.
- Define different weights for different products and different SKUs.
- Create product assortments.
- Manage omnichannel product catalogs.
- Create assortments for each channel.
- Create serial numbers.
- Configure product attributes.
Pricing, discounts, and promotions
Commerce lets you create channel price groups and manage the prices within a given commerce channel. You can define the base product prices and prices that are associated with trade agreements.
These prices can be defined together with retail discount offers that enable you to do mix-and-match discounts, quantity discounts and thresholds, coupons and loyalty schemes, and shipping and tender-based discounts. A retail pricing simulator allows you to verify the prices that are being sent to the channels.
Omnichannel payments
With Commerce, you can create an order in one channel and fulfill it in another channel while preserving payment details together with the rest of the order details. Then, the system uses those payment details when the order is recalled or processed in another channel.
A classic example is the "Buy online, pick up in store" scenario. In this scenario, the payment details are added when the order is created online. They are then recalled at the Store Commerce to charge the customer's payment card at the time of pickup.
Centralized inventory management
Commerce offers centralized inventory management that encompasses purchasing, inventory transfers, stock counts, and store replenishment. It provides a flexible way to manage the inventory in one central place and distribute it to stores based on pre-defined replenishment rules.
Distributed order management
With Commerce, you can optimize the shipping of products to customers based on where the customer is geographically located and where the nearest item is to that customer. It represents an intelligent broker that looks across various systems to centralize your order management and work across any channel of Commerce.
By analyzing your warehouses and your retail stores, you can select how best to optimize that order and reduce your overall shipping and logistics costs. With this feature, retailers can improve customer experiences and satisfaction and have a more efficient sales and distribution process.