What is a Product Family?
Product families provide a grouping for your products that can be considered different “feature levels” or “plans” of the same service or offering. If you’re building a web app with different plans, in general, a product family will represent your app, and products will represent your plans. We’ve just generalized the terminology to apply to more situations.
Creating Product Families
Product families are created in your catalog. Clicking the “Create New Product Family” will create a new product family in your site.
Product families - expand to reveal product family contents
When you create a new product family, you can define a name, description and API handle. Description and API handle are optional, while name is required.
Product families - expand to reveal product family contents
Edit Product Families
You can easily edit the any aspect of any product family. Click edit family and you can rename the family, or edit the description.
Archiving Families
If you are done with an entire product family, you can chose to archive it. Select archive family on the family you would like to archive. This removes it from view and makes it inaccessible to your future subscribers.Once a family is archived, you must contact support@maxio.com in order to have it restored. An option does not exist to delete a product family.
How to structure Product Families and Products
Let’s say we’re Acme Corporation, and we have two web applications:
- Project management suite called “AcmeProjects”
- CRM called “AcmeCRM”
Our Acme brand is strong, and our customers often sign up for both of our services. In this case, we might make a single site called “Acme”, and two product families:
- AcmeProjects
- AcmeCRM
This way, our customers might be able to sign up both services and we treat them as one customer/user/login on both our own site and on Advanced Billing. We would be able to compare sales data directly between AcmeProjects and AcmeCRM. Our customer’s credit cards would show charges from the same entity (Acme Corp) for both products.
On the other hand, let’s consider a case where the AcmeProjects and AcmeCRM brands are strong on their own right, and we wish to keep them more separated. Perhaps we have 2 different merchant accounts and we want the credit card charges to show up separately as AcmeProjects and AcmeCRM. In this case, we might create two sites, each with their own subdomain and one product family within each.