Products Overview

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:

• Subscriptions

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. 

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

Products cannot be deleted, but they can be archived. Archiving a product prevents new subscriptions from being created with that product, whether through signup or migration. However, existing subscriptions will continue as usual with the archived product unless they are changed or migrated to a different product.

You cannot archive a product if there are any pending delayed changes for it. If you receive an 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, refer to the articles on 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.