Product FAQs

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.

Product Price Points vs Product Versions

The product price point replaces product versions. A product version, was a copy of a product that Advanced Billing generated everytime a versioned field on a product was edited: price, recurring period, trial price, trial period, setup fee, expiration. Once a new version was generated, all subscriptions created for the product would use the new version going forward. Subscriptions already on a previous version would stay on the older version unless moved.

Product price points gives more flexbility to products by allowing you to:

• define multiple price points per product, each with different pricing and frequencies
• set a default price point to be used when not explicitly selected
• easily move subscriptions between price points
• archive / unarchive price points as needed

When the change to using product price points was introduced, all versions were converted to price points and given then name of the version number. For example, a product version which was version 2, would have a name of “v2”.

For more information on product price points, see the Product Price Points documentation.