Give your customers free trials of Microsoft products

Appropriate roles: User management admin | Sales agent | Admin agent

A good way to introduce customers to new Microsoft products is to offer one-month free trials. You can sign up customers for the free trials in the catalog just like you sign up for many other online services.

All partners can participate.

Find available trial offers

You can find your outstanding trial offers on the Customer page. This page lists all subscriptions, including free trials and paid subscriptions. This feature isn't available in China.

Each customer is entitled to one free trial for each available offer. For example, they can get one free trial for Microsoft 365 Business Standard and one free trial for Office 365 E3. But if the customer already owns the offer, they can't use a free trial for that offer.

Find available products

Free trials are available for the most comprehensive and popular license-based offers. New trial offers can be introduced on a monthly basis.

For legacy offers, partners can find trials in the monthly price list on the Pricing and offers page in Partner Center. Trial offers have TRIAL listed in the price list Secondary License Type column.

In New commerce, trials can be found by filtering for Trial in the Tags column.

There are no free trials for government offers, education offers, or add-on offers.

Understand the licenses available for free trials

All free trials provide 25 licenses.

• You specify the number of licenses the paid subscription should have after the trial converts during purchase.
• You assign trial licenses to users in the same way that you assign paid services licenses.
• You can't change the number of licenses during the trial.
• You can't add or remove licenses during the free trial.

Sign up customers for trials

To get a trial for your customer in Partner Center, use the following steps:

1. From Customers, go to your Customer list, and then select a customer.
2. Select New Subscription to open up the catalog.
3. Search for the trial you want to offer.

• Under Products, trials have both Trial and License listed below the Product Name. You can also search by the Product:Sku from the price list.
• In the cart view, you can specify the number of licenses, term, and billing frequency that the corresponding paid subscription has when the trial converts.
• During trials, you aren't billed. In legacy, trials last 30 days. In new commerce, trials last one month (ISO 8601 P1M).
• You can convert a free trial to a paid subscription at any time during the trial.

Configure trial renewal at purchase

When checking out a cart with an NCE license-based trial, you can select the billing plan, subscriptions term, and license quantity that the corresponding paid subscription has at trial renewal.

• Select the Configure trial renewal option on the Review page of checkout to update these attributes.
• If you don't specify any values, the trial renews into an annual term paid monthly subscription with 25 licenses by default.
• Partners can continue to update these values after purchase, before the trial converts into a paid subscription.
• You can't turn off autorenewal from a trial to a paid subscription during the purchase flow.

Convert trials to paid subscriptions

In new commerce, trials automatically renew to paid subscriptions.

For legacy offers, a free trial isn't automatically converted to a paid subscription. You must convert a free trial into a paid subscription yourself. You can do so in Partner Center or by using the Partner Center APIs.

• If a free trial isn't converted into a paid subscription within 30 days, it expires.
• Free trials can't be extended.

Convert legacy trials by using Partner Center

To convert trials to paid subscriptions in Partner Center, use the following steps:

1. Go to the customer's subscription page, and select the free trial.
2. Select Convert trial to paid subscription.
3. Enter the desired license quantity and billing frequency, and select Apply.

• Billing for the paid subscription begins on the conversion date.
• The subscription automatically renews 12 months from the conversion date.

Convert legacy trials by using APIs

You might need to alter your APIs to accommodate the conversion of a free trial to a paid subscription. For more information, see the following developer documentation:

• Convert a trial subscription to paid
• Get a list of trial conversion offers

Understand trials without conversions

• You can't convert all trials to paid subscriptions.
• You can use a trial that can't be converted until the expiration date.
• You can purchase compatible offers that support the same services as the trial offer. Purchase the offers before the trial expires to ensure that the newly purchased offers' services align with the trial's services.

Track expiring offers

You aren't notified of expiring offers. You can track upcoming expiration dates using the Customer view at Partner Center or by querying the API. It's a good idea to monitor these dates frequently so you can take the appropriate follow-up actions with customers as they approach a decision point.

After a trial expires, a customer who attempts to sign in to that trial sees an expiration message. Their data is retained in accordance with data retention standards. After you purchase a new subscription with the same service plans, your customer's data can be accessed again from the newly activated subscription.

Convert new commerce trials to paid subscriptions

For new commerce license-based offers, your free trial renews into the equivalent paid subscription after one month (P1M).

If partners don't want a trial subscription to convert to a paid subscription by default, they can turn off autorenew so the trial expires at the end of the trial period.

There are two ways to convert a trial to a new paid subscription: Immediate conversion and Scheduled conversion.

Do an immediate conversion

• When doing an immediate conversion, you can convert a free trial to a paid subscription at any time before the end of the P1M trial period.
• Partners can add more licenses during the immediate conversion, but reducing the number of licenses isn't allowed.
• Changes go into effect immediately.

Do a scheduled conversion

• When doing a scheduled conversion:
  • You can modify the billing term and frequency.
  • You can choose the number of licenses that you want to convert.
  • Changes go into effect automatically, as soon as the trial period ends.

• Trial subscriptions, when automatically converted to full commercial subscriptions, have the standard seven-day cancellation period.
  • Within the first seven days, partners can cancel the licenses and be refunded the full amount minus the prorated amount for the days the subscriptions were used. For more information about new commerce experience (NCE) cancellation, see Cancel a subscription.
  • Within the first seven days, partners can decrease the number of licenses and be refunded the full amount minus the prorated amount for the days the subscriptions were used. For more information, see Increase or decrease licenses in new commerce license-based subscriptions.
  • If more than seven days elapse after conversion, partners can't cancel licenses or decrease the number of licenses until the next cancellation window at renewal.

Partners can also convert trials to existing paid subscriptions. In this scenario, the existing subscription must be a subscription that's eligible for the trial conversion. If so, you add the trial licenses to the existing subscription and the end date remains the same for the existing paid subscription.

When partners convert a trial to a new paid subscription, they can choose to convert to the same paid SKU or upgrade to a higher SKU.

If you want to convert your trial to a paid subscription before the end of the trial period, you can do so using Partner Center APIs or in Partner Center itself using the following steps.

Convert new commerce trials using Partner Center

To immediately convert new commerce trials to paid subscriptions in Partner Center, use the following steps:

1. Go to the customer's subscription page, and select the free trial.
2. Select Convert trial to paid subscription.
3. Choose the paid equivalent and then select Submit.

Billing for the paid subscription begins on the conversion date, and the subscription renews 12 months from the conversion date.

To schedule trial conversions to take place automatically at the end of the trial period, use the following steps:

1. In Partner Center, go to the customer's subscription page and select the free trial.
2. Ensure that Auto-renew is enabled.
3. Select Manage renewal.
4. Make the updates you want for the conversion and then select Submit.

Billing for the paid subscription begins on the conversion date. The subscription renews 12 months after the conversion date.

Partners must manage trial conversions. There isn't any subscription-based alerting in Partner Center to let partners know when a trial is expiring.

Understand billing

Annual billing and free trials are the same in both the public cloud and sovereign clouds (examples: Azure Government and Azure China 21Vianet). The only difference is the trial SKUs available at the time of launch.

Learn about billing for free trials

• The subscription start date is based on the conversion date.
• You can use free trials for both monthly and annually billed subscriptions.
• Default conversion settings are a term of one year and a monthly billing cycle.
• You can select the billing frequency when you convert the trial to a paid subscription.
• If a free trial converts to a paid offer with annual billing, the subscription renewal date is 12 months after the conversion date.
• If a free trial converts to a paid offer with monthly billing, the subscription renewal date is 12 months from the billing date following the conversion date.

Understand legacy invoices

You don't see free trials listed in your invoice or license-based reconciliation file.

• A free trial appears on your invoice and license-based reconciliation file only after you convert it to a paid subscription.
• The converted subscription appears in the same way as any new subscription.

Understand new commerce invoices

You don't see free trials listed in your invoice, but you can find them in your reconciliation file by checking the ProductQualifiers attribute in the reconciliation file.

Learn about incentives

Free trials don't affect incentives.

Contact support

For support on free trials, submit a service request through Partner Center.

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