In Advanced Billing, you sell Subscriptions to your Products. You must first create and configure a Product before you can sell anything in your site. Products are administered on a site-by-site basis, located in your Catalog.
In your app or business, you might call these products your “Plans” or “Feature Levels”. For example, if you have “Basic”, “Pro”, and “Max” plans, each of these would be a separate product within Advanced Billing.
Collapsed product families - expand to reveal product family contents
Related Topics:
Product Families
Products belong to a product family. Product families should contain the products that are all different “feature levels” of the same thing – i.e. you can usually upgrade and downgrade between products within the same product family. The product family documentation goes in to more depth on how to structure your product family and product relationships.
Creating a Product
Once you have created a product family, you will have access to the “create a product” link next to the product family name.
Create a product family or product in a site
Some of the basic parameters of a product are:
- Name
- Description
- Accounting code
- Product editing such as return URL and parameters, API handle, credit card requirements, and address requirements. These settings also allow you to set the recurring interval, recurring price, trial period, trial price, initial fees, and expiration intervals
Archiving Products, Coupons & Components
Deleting products isn’t supported, but what is supported is archiving products. Archiving products removes the ability for new subscriptions to be created with that product (either by signup or migration). However, existing subscriptions will continue normally against their archived product unless moved via product change or migration away from it.
Please note that you will not be able to archive a product if there are any delayed product changes pending for it. If you receive this error when trying to archive a product, you can find the pending changes by running a subscriptions export and looking at the next_product_id column.
For more information on the process, please reference our documentation for archiving components and coupons.
Why do we call them “Products”, and not “Plans” ?
Advanced Billing makes it easy to sell other things that are not plan-based, such as Sponsorships. Often, these things might belong to separate product families along side your normal recurring service offerings. “Plans” just seemed too restrictive.
Just think of it this way:
- If your customers can pay for it, its a product.
- If they can upgrade/downgrade to another product, then those products are part of the same product family.