Product Catalogue

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Last updated: Nov 29, 2018 by Apostolos Karakaxas

In interworks.cloud platform, the Product Catalog has been designed specifically for subscription-based businesses (prepaid or consumption model) but we fully support license based or one-off products too.

'Get Services Definition' Action

On this page, you can find an analysis of how the Get Services Definition (GSD) mechanism functions asynchronously after its major improvement, as well as which are the new GSD user-interface features that BSS users can utilize to view the progress of the mechanism and the logs containing the results.

Understanding Product Types

A product type is an entity that is used for defining a service in the platform. The definition takes place through configuring the various properties and characteristics of the service, on product type level, so the product type can then be used as a template to spawn as many different editions of the services as required. The product types are used by the product managers for defining the editions ('products' in interworks.cloud platform) of a service by setting for each edition, specific values for each characteristic. In this way, the editions are "instances" of the product types, meaning that you can have many  products of the same type, while each product has only one product type.

Enable Product Trials

An important feature of the product management facilities of interworks.cloud platform is the enablement of trial subscriptions for your end-customers. A trial subscription is a subscription that carries no charge for the customer, and provides full access to a product or service for a limited amount of time. Let's see how this can be configured at your Cloud Platform!

Product Pricing & Billing Settings

Some basic billing settings for subscription-based products lay on the 'Products' module. Those can be found in the 'Pricing' section.

Creating Products

Creating and adding new products is crucial for maintaining your Catalog offering accurate and up-to-date. For this reason, the interworks.cloud platform offers a wide array of options that accommodate different product creation scenarios, from one-off products (such as setting up a managed service) to subscriptions  (such as an IaaS offering) and pay-per-use services (such as back-up).

Create & Manage a Price List

One of the most important functionalities of the interworks.cloud platform is the ability to create and assign price lists.  In general, price lists offer significant advantages as they allow you to: 

  • Define and apply specific pricing policies for one or more customers (i.e., groups, such as medium-sized customers, loyal customers, etc.)

Define Catalogue Categories

This page explains how the product manager can create the catalogue categories.

Product Pricing Options

Setting Product Billing Day

By default, the recurring products are billed on the customer's billing day. For changing this, you should set for a product a specific billing day that overrides any billing options the customer might have.

Billing the Overage of a Consumption-Based Product

Enabling Pricing Protection for a Product

Non-Automatically Provisioned Services

For services that cannot be automatically delivered to the customer, because our platform does not support automatic provisioning of the service, you can define a flow where you can swiftly manage and deliver the service to the customer by involving your internal team to provision manually the service your customer ordered. For enabling this flow for a specific service, we have introduced the option “Non-automatic execution of new orders” on the product type level. This option enables the following order fulfillment flow:

  1. A new order that your customer places in your Marketplace is not executed automatically but it is submitted for review.

  2. Your operation team is notified that there is a new order that needs to be managed manually.

  3. Your operation team should deliver (i.e., provision) the service manually either by contacting the Vendor of the service or by using tools the Vendor offers to your team for this purpose.

  4. When the service has been delivered to the customer, your operation team can now execute the order in the BSS portal for the subscription to be created and initiate invoicing.

Required Products

This page contains information on what required products are and how to set them for a specific product.

Mutually Exclusive Products

This page explains how to define mutually exclusive products. If two products are mutually exclusive, it means that they cannot co-exist under the same customer. for enforcing this rule, our system will not allow a customer to purchase a product if he has already an active subscription for one of the products that are incompatible with this product.

Managing Product Groups

The Product Group feature is actually a way to group products of the same product type for presentation purposes. This is useful when we want to have a common presentation layer of a service at Storefront (i.e. various editions of a software) which will also include a list of the product characteristics of each edition of the software (i.e. the products "Office 365 Business Essentials", "Office 365 Business Premium" are related with the "Office 365 Business" product group).  Thus, it makes for a more economical way to manage different 'flavors' of the same software in terms of marketing preparation, but also offers a more clear way of depicting the offering selection to the customer! Let's see how to create Product Groups:

Bulk Import & Update of Products

Product Catalogue Importer Tool

The bulk import and update of your product catalogue can be achieved using our Products Importer tool that is available in product module. Using our importer, you can upload an excel file with your products and the products will be imported/updated by mapping excel columns with product properties.

Pay-Per-Use Services

Product Bundles

Bundles are a new type of product that we are planning to introduce in our platform in the following months. With Bundles, Distributors and Service Providers will gain the ability to include multiple products in one single Product SKU having a single billing event with better prices than purchasing all products separately.