The Adobe products are represented in our system as add-ons. However, Adobe Sign products have their own actual add-ons. Overall, the add-ons are an essential part of an Adobe subscription, and when your customers/partners place an order for an Adobe add-on(product) or an Adove Sign add-on via the Adobe container product, a new record is created in our platform for managing and invoicing purposes.
This page explains all the relevant information you and your partners may need to manage the Adobe add-ons and Adobe Sign add-ons.
Managing Adobe Subscriptions in Storefront
Your resellers can access the Adobe Subscriptions with the add-ons they have purchased from the Subscriptions section that is in the Billing area of your Storefront by locating the Adobe active Subscriptions.
Your resellers will be redirected to the list of the Subscriptions they purchased by clicking on the respective link.
The details page of an Adobe Subscription in Storefront includes all the information our system keeps.
Managing Adobe Add-ons in Storefront
The Adobe add-ons are always located within their corresponding Adobe subscriptions and can be accessed either by navigating to the Subscriptions' list and clicking on the + icon of a subscription or by navigating to a Subscription's View page.
Ordering New Add-ons(Products)
The reseller can purchase one or more Adobe add-ons (actual products) for an existing Adobe subscription by clicking on the I Want To... button and then choosing the option “Buy add-ons“.
After the add-ons are chosen from the pop-up window that appears, displaying all the relevant add-ons, the checkout process can be initiated by clicking on the respective button. 
Please note that the aforementioned button ("Buy add-ons") is used only for purchasing non-purchased add-ons and it has nothing to do with the purchase of additional add-on licenses/consumables. The analysis of increasing the licenses/consumables for a purchased and active add-on follows below.
Ordering New Adobe Sign Add-ons(Add-ons of Adobe Sign Products)
The reseller can also purchase Adobe Sign add-ons for two specific Adobe Sign products (namely, the Acrobat Sign Solutions for business, and the Acrobat Sign Solutions for enterprise) by clicking on the I Want To... button and then selecting the option Buy Add-ons.
More specifically, in the products Excel file, downloaded from the Adobe Portal, these Sign add-ons are marked as Phone Authentication Add On under the Excel column Additional Details. However, these add-ons have the two aforementioned Adobe Sign Solutions products as prerequisites for purchasing them. This means that a BSS or Storefront user can add the Sign add-on to a new Adobe order, which must also contain the relative Sign base product in order to execute the order successfully. 
However, the user should follow a different process in order to purchase a Sign add-on for an existing Adobe subscription. More specifically, the Adobe Sign base product should be re-ordered and included with its respective Sign add-on in the same Adobe order.Please note that only a Storefront user can order a Sign add-on for an existing Adobe subscription. In order to do that, the Storefront user must locate the correct Adobe subscription and increase the quantity of the existing Sign base product by one.
After that, the Storefront user must return back to the Subscription details view page, click the I Want To… button, and select the option Buy Add-ons, to add the respective Adobe Sign add-on, and submit it to the basket.
Eventually, the basket will include both of these products, meaning the Adobe Sign add-on along with the (prerequisite) base Adobe Sign product (increase).
This outcome, having the Sign base product increase and a new Sign add-on into a single order, can not be done via BSS.
Increasing the Licenses/Consumables of an Existing Adobe Add-on
For increasing the licenses/consumables of an existing Adobe add-on, the Storefront user must look at the “WHAT YOU PAY“ section of the subscriptions view-page and under the product’s subscription, the purchased add-ons are visible and unified. When the Storefront user clicks on the … (three-dot) action button next to an add-on, the add-on's quantity can be increased via the pop-up window that appears.
Immediate Cancellation of an Adobe Order
To cancel an add-on immediately, in the Storefront, select I want to... and then Cancel Adobe Order.
Select the order in the pop-up, select Proceed and a dialog box will ask for confirmation. Only orders which are eligible for cancellation are displayed in this list, which is retrieved from Adobe.
The pop-up window contains the following columns:
- Order ID - The Adobe OrderID
- Customer ID - The Adobe CustomerID
- Created Date (UTC) - The order creation date in UTC
- Days left to cancel - The remaining days for which the order will be eligible for cancellation
Each order can be expanded to display the following:
- Product - The description of the product
- Offer ID - The SKUID used by the interworks.cloud platform to provision the Adobe service, which also contains the level/tier purchased
- Quantity - The number of licenses/consumables in the order
Alternatively, you may go to Active Subscriptions, select … and then select Cancel Adobe Order.
Before the cancellation is completed, a confirmation message is displayed for the user to verify that they want to cancel this order.
Once the user selects Yes, the order is successfully canceled, and the following message is displayed.
If the canceled order refers to a full add-on cancellation, the addon’s status will also change to Canceled.
Possible Errors During Cancellation
By selecting the Cancel Adobe Order option, all orders which are eligible for cancellation, are retrieved from Adobe.
If there no cancellation orders are displayed, then the following message appears: There are no orders eligible for cancellation within the past 14 days.
If the order cannot be retrieved from Adobe because of a communication error, the following message appears: An unexpected error was received from Adobe during the order cancellation (----Adobe Returned Error----). Please try again later.
For any other unexpected error, the following message appears: An unexpected error occurred. Please review the Adobe Service Manager logs for more details.
If, however, the user selects one order to cancel and then selects proceed, the two last unexpected errors (#2, #3), may appear as well during this step.
Also, the following error messages are displayed after the user clicks on Proceed in the pop-up window of Cancel Adobe Order.
Depending on the platform, either BSS or Storefront, different messages appear since in BSS there are more specific messages that explain what actions the distributor should do, and in the Storefront, there are more generic messages for the reseller to not be confused.
| BSS | Storefront | |
|---|---|---|
| Error 1 | The selected order with ID "orderid" cannot be canceled. SKU ID(s) "skuid" is not found. Please fill in the missing SKUID(s) "skuid" in the add-on product page. | The selected add-ons of the order with ID "orderid" cannot be cancelled. Please check if add ons with SKU “skuid1,skuid2“ have already been canceled, otherwise, contact your Adobe Distributor because these SKUs are not found. |
| Error 2 | The selected Adobe Order with ID "orderid" cannot be canceled. Price for the product(s) "productname1, productname2,….." was not found. | The selected Adobe Order with ID "orderid" cannot be canceled. Price for the product(s) "productname1, productname2,….." was not found. Please contact your Adobe Distributor. |
| Error 3 | The selected Adobe Order with ID "orderid" cannot be canceled. An existing cancellation request was found for the product(s) "productname1, productname2,…..". To proceed, please revoke the cancellation request. | The selected Adobe Order with ID "orderid" cannot be canceled. An existing cancellation request was found for the product(s) "productname1, productname2,…..". To proceed, please revoke the cancellation request. |
| Error 4 | The selected Adobe Order with ID “orderid” cannot be canceled. The sync status of the product(s) “productname1,productname 2, productname3…“ within the subscription in turned to “failed”. Please use the button “retry” in the Addon section of the subscription to try again. | The selected Adobe Order with ID “orderid” cannot be canceled due to a sync problem of the subscription products. Please contact your Adobe Distributor. |
| Error 5 | An unexpected communication error with Adobe occurred (Line item has already been returned). Please try again later. |
Regarding subscription cancellation, please see the Cancel Adobe Subscription section below.
Schedule Licenses/Consumables Cancellation
To cancel an add-on from an active Adobe subscription or decrease the licenses at the end of the billing period, select I want to, in the subscription view, and then select Cancel an add-on. In the pop-up, select the add-on to cancel or decrease licenses and select End of Billing Period.
Selecting Immediate under Cancellation Type, results in an error message. The section below describes how to perform an immediate cancellation.
Managing Adobe Subscriptions in BSS
The Adobe subscriptions can be found in our BSS by navigating to BSS > Billing > Subscriptions module or from the subscriptions section that is available on the account details page.
Cancel Adobe Subscription
The Cancel the subscription button is not available for Adobe subscriptions. Canceling an Adobe Subscription creates the possibility of a mismatch in the billing cycle dates between Adobe and interworks.cloud, if a new shell subscription is purchased for the same customer. For this reason, the functionality has been disabled.
Enabling/Disabling "Automatic Renewal" of Adobe Subscriptions
When an Adobe subscription is created, the “Renew Automatically” field is set by default to enable in both our system as well as in Adobe's system. This feature automatically renews the Adobe subscriptions on the next billing cycle (annually) and offers your resellers reduced churn. However, if the end customer of a reseller does not wish to have his Adobe subscription(s) renewed, the BSS user can navigate to the Shortcuts menu of the Adobe subscription in BSS and click on the dynamic toggle Deactivate auto-renew button, so that the services won’t be renewed in Adobe on the next billing cycle.
By deactivating the auto-renewal of the subscription, the provisioning is executed, and the Adobe system will be updated as well. So, Adobe Services will turn to Inactive when the billing cycle ends.
As a result, the sync statuses of the add-ons will remain synced, but the sync status of the subscription will turn to inactive.
Managing Adobe Add-ons in BSS
For every Adobe add-on (product) purchased by a reseller for him or one of his end customers, our system creates an add-on record under the Adobe subscription. This record is accessible through the BSS > Billing > Subscriptions and from the Adobe Subscription's view page in BSS, you can locate the Add-on section.
The same rules apply to managing the Adobe add-ons in Storefront.
To manually add another add-on inside an existing Adobe subscription, you have to create a new Order and relate it with the existing Adobe subscription.
After the creation of the Order, the BSS user can open it and by selecting the Products tab and clicking on the edit marker button (green highlight), they can choose to relate a subscription from the first drop-down menu and on the next drop-down menu, select the name of that subscription. Lastly, to save the changes, please click on the Save button.
Canceling Adobe Orders in BSS & Storefront
Adobe products have been designed to support “partial charges” in their pricing rules. This means, that cancellations within 14 days happen in a prorated way on our end. So if an order is eligible for cancellation, the credit invoice is created to represent the billing cycle not used from the effective date of the cancellation until the end of the billing cycle.
However, Adobe returns to their distributors the full amount of any returned order if it is eligible for cancellation. Currently, our system does not have a way to support this method yet.
Consequently, while the distributor is compensated with the full amount, the credit invoice of the reseller will contain the same amount or less since only the unused days are compensated.
A workaround that can be applied at this point is to manually create a credit invoice for the rest of the amount.
Example:
This is a customer’s invoice for purchasing the Adobe services shell product, with Acrobat Pro. Acrobat Pro has an annual billing cycle of: 14/11/2021-13/11/2022 and its unit price is 197.76€.
On 18/11/2021 the user cancels the 5 licenses of Acrobat Pro. The following credit invoice is created:
Since a fewer number of days is compensated (18/11/21-13/11/22) the unit price is 195.59€.
In order to cover this difference in amounts (2.17€ / license), the BSS user can manually create a new credit invoice. Then, via the Import from Invoice action, they can select the debit invoice of the original purchase.
When the pop-up window opens, the BSS user can select the invoice item they wish to compensate and add its new unit price (which will be the difference between the two previous invoices).
Partial Order Cancellation
Concerning the partial cancellations, our system will contact Adobe via the external pricing module to receive the purchase price for the requested licenses, and then proceed with the partial cancellation of those Adobe add-on licenses. Depending on the Level of volume discount that these licenses were purchased in the past (historically kept), our system will utilize the exact same prices to calculate the credit invoice, even if the customer has changed Level in the process, or a new Excel file has been uploaded with different prices. Therefore, the calculation of the partial cancellation will always be the exact same price that was used to purchase the licenses (irrespective of current Level or updated prices), which in turn translates to the final credit invoice.
Please note that for renewed subscriptions, the price is retrieved from the current Excel file based on the renewed offer id. The customer's level is not taken into account in this case.
Example with Levels:
Customer B purchases 2 Photoshop licenses at Level 1. Then purchases 150 Presenter licenses at Level 4.
If the customer wants to cancel the first 2 licenses (of Photoshop) the following will take place:
- The customer remains at Level 4 for any new purchases.
- The amount that is going to be compensated is 2 licenses at Level 1, which is the Level at which the customer purchased the licenses and not their current level.
For our system to handle partial cancellations, we keep certain details, such as the Offer ID that Adobe responded to us as the correct level of this service, and we also keep the Excel file from which the price was retrieved during the actual purchase. Consequently, when our system retrieves all the necessary information that was used during the purchase, the correct price is returned to our external pricing module for completing the partial cancellation and creating the credit invoice.
Please check the following two tabs on how you can perform a partial cancellation of an order in BSS and Storefront.
Adobe Grace Period
Adobe provides a Grace Period that allows the use of their services even if the customer has not renewed their subscription for another year. The time-permitted window is usually 30 days (depending on the service) without excluding the fact that this number can change at any time by Adobe. This means that an Adobe service can be utilized for about 30 more days after the subscription end date. However, our systems do not manage nor display the grace period information since this feature is only offered by Adobe. On our side, an Adobe subscription during the grace period is considered either expired or canceled, so the subscription’s status is either inactive or canceled. If the user wants to reactivate an expired subscription during the grace period, they should create a new order.
Adobe Subscription Renewal
Upon renewal, the billing service runs for each organization independently, and it runs based on the time zone of the organization. The billing service changes the cycle of the subscription and triggers the external pricing mechanism to request the subscription renewal amounts from Adobe.
The Adobe Service Manager will return the following error message when external pricing fails to retrieve prices from Adobe upon renewal:
The billing service will continue retrying for the failed subscription for 10 days.
Adobe Services for Tenant Resellers via Backordering
For information on making available the Adobe VIP MP services to Tenant Resellers by enabling the backordering functionality between a root organization and a tenant reseller, please continue to the Adobe VIP MP Services for Tenant Resellers page.