What a Commerce assortment records — a channel, a product, a date range — and the allocation depth, size curve and store clustering it never derives.
An assortment in Dynamics 365 Commerce maps channels to products and carries no quantity, depth or open-to-buy field. The quantity lives in a different form, and all three of its distribution methods resolve to a weight somebody typed.
Ordered by chapter. Each post stands alone but builds on the one before it.
Microsoft's documentation says a Commerce product hierarchy is for assortment planning. This is every field that surface actually gives you — and every one is a classification or an availability flag, never a quantity.
No. The only place an assortment touches a quantity in Dynamics 365 Commerce is a checkbox called Respect assortments, and it is a veto rather than an input — it can remove a store from a distribution, never size one.
Five documented reasons a published assortment does not appear at a channel in Dynamics 365 Commerce, the order to check them in, and the two pages that verify the result — including the one where an approved assortment is still correctly withheld.
Store grouping in Dynamics 365 Commerce is an organization hierarchy you draw, and it does nothing for assortments until it carries the Retail assortment purpose. What inheritance gives you, and what no field computes.
Three distribution methods on the buyer's push, and all three resolve to a weight somebody typed — a replenishment rule carrying a Weight field, a proportional store weight, or an equal split. What each one reads, and what none of them reads.
You can build many category hierarchies in Dynamics 365 Commerce, but only one can carry the Product hierarchy type — one per organization. What that constrains for multi-banner retailers, and what the other two types are for.
Retail product properties in Dynamics 365 Commerce are global — every legal entity shares the same value. Basic product properties are legal entity–specific. Same form, two scopes, and the difference is easy to read past.
The current buyer's push page runs to 319 words and names one distribution method. The only enumeration of the rest on Microsoft Learn is an archived page scoped to Dynamics AX 2012 R3 and dated 2014. What that is evidence of, and what it is not.
Dynamics 365 Commerce has three category hierarchy types with three documented purposes. Which one carries merchandising and assortment planning, which one is a working set, and which one your customers actually browse.
A hierarchy classifies a product, a category groups it, and an assortment authorises it for a channel and a date range. Only one of the three decides whether a store can sell something — and it decides nothing until a batch job runs.
Five merchandising decisions Dynamics 365 Commerce records faithfully and does not make — each one bounded to the pages we read — plus two things we have not researched and say so.