Product Lifecycle and Best Practices

To build your Product listing, follow this general product lifecycle:

  1. Ensure you've prepared product-related objects such as Billing Plans, Rate Plans, or Tokens.
  2. Create new or duplicate an existing Product.
  3. Enter the relevant Product details, make sure to enter unique IDs .
  4. Select whether the Product Pricing is fixed, based on usage or defined elsewhere such as in the billing plan.
    Tip: Subscribe Best Practice is to define prices on the Product itself . The Billing Plan (billing frequency for a subscription) can also include a price but this then limits its flexibility and re-use for several products. If both the Product and Billing Plan include a price as part of a Subscription, the customer is charged the sum of those prices
  5. Create the relevant entitlement for the product so that when the product is purchased, subscribers gain access to the service.
  6. Save the Product. The Product is saved as part of your Product Catalog.
  7. Activate the Product when you are ready.
  8. Offer the Product in your online store.
  9. When the product is purchased as a one-time purchase or a subscription, make sure to pass all the relevant purchase details to Subscribe.
  10. You can edit the products at any time. It is important to understand that any changes will impact all subscriptions (existing and new) of the product.
    Tip: Based on your business, you should decide whether product price changes should impact all customers. For example, if inflation exists, you can change the product price and this will apply to all recurring subscriptions starting from the next billing cycle. If the product price was overridden when the subscription was created, the product price change will not impact these subscriptions.
  11. To keep a list of Products, you can export the Products to a csv file. Click the Download button and select whether to download the current displayed results only (by default, 10 to a page) or the full result list.
  12. Track the Product effectiveness and revenue using the Projection Summary by Product Report and the Active Subscriptions Report available as part of the Insights menu.
  13. A Product can be disabled. When disabled, the product will no longer be offered to new customers (or appear in the catalog). However, existing subscriptions of the product will continue uninterrupted.