Updates to enhance omnichannel shopping with Dynamics 365 Commerce

With many countries still facing the ongoing impact of COVID-19, retailers and consumer-facing businesses are shifting their focus on adapting to emerging customer needs and shopping behaviors. Microsoft Dynamics 365 has been working with many of our customers to enable them to deliver omnichannel shopping capabilities including an increased focus on digital commerce and contactless shopping options like in-store or curbside collection. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce customers have been able to rapidly transition their shopper engagement and fulfillment processes to quickly meet customer demand while also delivering a safe working environment for their employees.

In our 2020 release wave 2 update, Dynamics 365 Commerce continues to invest in further empowering retailers to be highly productive in their tasks by helping them to know and better serve their customers along with efficiently running their operations across the value chain. With this updates, we are focused on driving innovation, infusing intelligence, and enabling agility within retailers across both physical and digital shopping channels. This includes delivering new tools for digital commerce, intelligent processes to streamline and personalize shopping experiences, and enhancing omnichannel capabilities to enable more businesses to transition to a unified commerce platform.

Enhance customer experiences with digital commerce

Improvements in digital commerce capabilities further enhance customer experience and business outcomes. With these investments, we are building upon the foundational e-commerce capabilities we launched with Dynamics 365 Commerce to improve ease of use and content creation.

• Intelligent content experimentation: Dynamics 365 Commerce will provide the ability to perform controlled experiments such as A/B testing on e-commerce websites including native integration with Optimizely. This will allow merchants to make data-driven updates to their e-commerce website experiences and encourage customers to engage more frequently, driving increased adoption and conversion rates.
• Visual page builder: We are introducing modern and responsive what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) content authoring interface, including drag and drop support, which will improve a marketers’ ability to create visually rich and enticing marketing and merchandising pages for their website.
• New e-commerce modules: The Dynamics 365 Commerce module library provides a comprehensive set of modules that can be used by customers to build an e-commerce site without the need for additional customization.

Drive growth with intelligence, insights, and analytics

Enhance solution through ingrained intelligence to drive growth and efficiencies. Utilize enhancements with AI and CS to further improve insights into business operations and deliver differentiated customer experiences.

• Shop similar looks (preview): Shop similar looks can bring fresh and appealing choices to the forefront of the shopping experience using the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The effect can be transformative and can create additional selling power as shoppers find more of the things they want in an easy-to-use visual experience.
• Microsoft Bing for Commerce powered search (preview): Microsoft Bing for Commerce will be seamlessly integrated into Dynamics 365 Commerce to provide consistent product discovery and search experiences across all commerce channels. Product discovery functionality is a quick and easy way for a retail customer to find products by browsing through categories and using search and filtering.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, loss prevention integration: We continue to invest in standing up native support for intelligent business solutions like Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection. In addition to payment protection integration we are also delivering loss prevention support to enhance business insights and decision making for improved business operation.

Streamline business performance with omnichannel excellence

Expand on omnichannel capabilities to improve business performance and agility to transition to new business practices. We continue to invest in core capabilities that support unified commerce capabilities including third-party integration and extensibility.

• Curbside pickup and contactless shopping: This feature will bring additional capabilities to facilitate curbside pickup or other unique pickup types to the order capture and processing flows. Organizations can configure multiple pickup modes of delivery that shoppers can choose from when placing an order.
• Enhanced support for modern payment methods: By providing digital wallet support across a range of payment providers, Microsoft can ensure that critical payment needs are met and fully enabled for omnichannel purchasing scenarios.

Learn more about new 2020 release wave 2 capabilities

These are just some of the innovations we are landing in our 2020 release wave 2 plans. You can find more information and details in our release notes for Dynamics 365 Commerce. We have many more announcements on the horizon so be sure to look out for more news and articles coming in the future.

For those interested in experiencing the capabilities within Dynamics 365 Commerce, contact us to organize a demo or to be put in contact with a partner that can help deliver a Commerce in a Day workshop. We also have a number of partner offers available on AppSource that can help take you live on Dynamics 365 Commerce in as little as two weeks.

Learn more about the great features we are bringing to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform in our 2020 release wave 2 plans or watch our Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event on demand.

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