Revision as of 20:47, 21 January 2009

Adding a New Product

Before adding a product, you must first add at least one product group. Once you have, then click the Add New Product link at the top of the Products/Services page in the Configuration section of WHMCS. You will be presented with a form to first specify the name and group the product should be in. Once you have entered these, click Continue and you will then see the product management screen. From here you can then proceed to set your product description, pricing, prorata options, stock options, package quotas, custom fields, configurable options, auto setup options and any other details.

Hiding a Product

To hide a product from the order form, click the edit icon next to a product/service. Then, from the main product options page, check the Hidden checkbox located towards the bottom of the first tab. Then simply save your changes to hide the product from the order form.

Advanced Options

• Show Domain Options - Unticking this box will mean the order process does not asl the user for a domain name which is useful for non-hosting related products and services

• Stock Control - WHMCS will keep track of the amount of stock of a product you have, decreasing the number by one each time a product is ordered and suspending orders for that product when the quantity reaches zero. This is most commonly used by dedicated server providers. The Stock tab is where you enable and set the available quantity.

• Subdomain - The subdomain setting allows you to offer a 4th domain option to clients - in addition to the register, transfer, use own domain options, clients can choose to use a free subdomain of the domain you enter in this field. For example you might enter .yourhostdomain.com (Great for free web hosts)

• Free Domain - The free domain settings allow you to specify if a domain name should be included free with the package. When enabled, if the user orders the product/service in one of the billing cycles you choose to allow a free domain with, with a domain name, then that domain name will be provided free of charge. The domain is free for the lifetime of the package and renews when due only if the associated package is also paid.

• Tax Product - Located on the Other tab, this setting allows you to specify whether this product or service should have tax charged on it if the user falls within one of the tax zones you have setup

• Product Order - The number in this field determines where the product shows on the order page. By default it is set to zero and the products are ordered in ascending cost order. By entering a value, this overides the default sort.

Prorata Billing

Prorata Billing allows you to bill your clients on a fixed day of the month for products/services no matter what day they were ordered. When the client orders, they will be charged the prorated amount which is calculated by dividing the total price by the number of days in the month and then multplying by the number of days left until the day of the month you set to charge the client on subsequent payments.

To use prorata billing for a product, from the product management screen select the Prorata tab. To activate it, tick the checkbox at the top of the page.

In the Prorata Date field, enter the day of the month you want to bill clients. For example, enter 1 and clients will be charged for that product each month on the 1st of each month.

In the Charge Next Month field, you enter the day number after which point you want to charge an additional month. This helps avoid getting small amounts. For example, if you set the charge next month field to 20, if a client orders on the 19th of the month a product with a cost of $30 they will be billed $15 on the date of order and then $30 each month on the 1st. However, if a client orders on the 20th of the month, they would be billed $10 to take it until the 1st of the next month and then the whole next month as the date of order is after the charge next month date so their total first payment would be $40 and they would then be billed $30 a month starting the 1st of the month in 2 months time.

Addons vs. Configurable Options

Configurable Options on products allow you to give your clients options which alter the price of that product. In this article, we will look at when you would use them and how.

When should I use configurable options instead of addons?

• If you want to offer a choice of options for a single thing - for example Disk Space, Operating System, Location
• If you want the total amount to be billed as a single item and not seperately
• When you want the billing cycle of the addon to match the billing cycle of the product

When should I use addons instead of configurable options?

• If the item is a one off service
• If it can be selected independantly of other items
• If it should be billed on it's own cycle - eg. a dedicated IP might be billed annually regardless of the package cycle

How do I setup Configurable Options?

Configurable options are setup in groups so that 1 set of options can be applied to multiple products. Setting up a new group of options is done in the following way:

1. To create a new group of configurable options, begin by going to Config > Configurable Options
2. Now click the Create a New Group link at the top of the page
3. You will then be shown a screen where you need to enter a name for the group and description (both of which are for admin viewing only)
4. You can also choose which products the new group will apply to but you can leave that until later
5. Now click Save Changes and the page will extend to show the options in this group
6. You can then add options by clicking the Add New Configurable Option button and add them in the same way as before - config option name, type, and the suboptions/pricing you want to offer for that configurable item
7. When you close the popup, the group page will refresh to show the new group you just added and you can then customise the order of the fields using the sort order box to hold a numerical position value.

And then applying a group of options to a product is easy. You can do it in two ways, firstly from the configurable options group pages that you were just on, or secondly, when editing a product you can choose the groups of options you want to show for the product on the Configurable Options tab.

Also note that certain modules require the configurable options to have a certain config option name. E.g The TCADMIN module requires the amount of game slots configuration to be called "Game Slots." However, you may want to call the option something else while not breaking the module (maybe to make it more clear). This can be done as follows. For example:

Game Slots|Select the amount of slots you want

This will communicate with the module with the section before the "|" symbol while displaying the text after the "|" symbol to the user on the actual order form.

Download Distribution

With WHMCS, you can setup products that have downloads associated with them. This is useful if you want to offer software, templates or other files for purchasing. With the download distribution, WHMCS will automatically handle the download permissions and only allow the items to be downloaded by customers that purchase the associated product required for the download and only when that product is active in their account.

You need to begin by adding the download to the support center downloads section. When adding the download, you need to tick the "Product Download" tick box to activate the download restrictions for that download. This is shown in the screenshot below:

http://v3manual.whmcs.com/screenshots/productdownloadconfig.gif

Once the download has been added, you can then select the download to apply to a product in the Product Configuration area. This is down from the Other tab. You can select multiple downloads to be associated with one product purchase. This is shown below:

http://v3manual.whmcs.com/screenshots/productdownloadproductconfig.gif

Direct Linking to a Product

You can find the link you need to link directly to the order page preselecting a certain product on the first tab of the product configuration page. The link is in the format www.yourdomain.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=x