Commerce Scale Units

Overview

When you set up Dynamics 365 Commerce you have the headquarters component which provides back-office capabilities. This is used by central retail staff to configure products, employees, business processes, and other functionality that is required for the business, and is also used by call center workers.

Dynamics 365 Commerce supports the hub and spoke model where the head-office capabilities are the hub, and channels such as the physical stores and the eCommerce website are the spokes. A Commerce Scale Unit is initialized to support a channel and combines components to provide the interface to the headquarters component.

eCommerce solutions

When an organization purchases an eCommerce Tier license a Commerce Scale Unit is provisioned to support the eCommerce transactions. If you need an additional Commerce Scale Unit for customization purposes perhaps, then you just purchase an additional eCommerce Tier license.

Retail stores

A default Commerce Scale Unit is also provisioned when you purchase 20 Commerce licenses and one or more Operations-Device licenses. This Commerce Scale Unit only supports device transactions.

If you want another Commerce Scale Unit for co-location, performance, or additional redundancy perhaps, then there’s a choice of Commerce Scale Unit licenses. There are three levels dependent on how many devices you want to support:

• Basic: up to 65 devices
• Standard: up to 225 devices
• Premium: up to 500 devices

The Commerce Scale Unit, in effect, includes those numbers of Operations-Device licenses and organizations can acquire further Operations-Device licenses as required. For instance, if Xanthic Tractors need another Commerce Scale Unit to use with 100 devices, they would purchase a Basic Commerce Scale Unit (which includes 65 devices) and 35 x Operations-Device licenses.

A Commerce Scale Unit is usually a cloud service deployed in one of the Azure data centers, but you can opt to have a Self-Hosted Commerce Scale Unit if required. This is typically useful when your retail store doesn’t have good Internet connectivity and it’s useful to have all the components deployed to a server in store to ensure business continuity. The rights to use a Self-Hosted Commerce Scale Unit are included when you purchase Dynamics 365 Commerce licenses.

Find all this documented in the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide by searching for “Commerce Scale Unit”.