Revision as of 19:08, 7 May 2020

Configure products via the Setup > Products/Services > Products/Services page.

For basic instructions for creating your first product group and product, see Setting Up Your First Product. This page explains all the advanced options available, including hiding products, stock control, and upgrades.

Product Groups

Products organize on the order form by group. Each group has a separate page, so you can split products into categories or across several pages for ease of display. For example, you may wish to list your shared hosting plans on a separate page to the reseller plans. Clients can switch between groups on the order form or you can link to them directly (see Links below).

To create a product group:

• Click the Create a New Group link.
• Enter a name for the group. This will display on the order form.
• Under normal circumstances, all product groups will use the system default order form template in the general settings. However, if you wish to use a different template for just this group, select it from the Order Form Template option here.
  The carttpl variable in the link URL can't overwrite any order form templates that you select.
• Use the checkboxes to select which payment gateways to offer on the checkout page for products within this group.
• To hide this group from the order form, check the Hidden checkbox.
• Click Create Group. To edit the group at a later date, click the corresponding Edit icon on the Products/Services page.

To customise display sorting, see Sorting

Products

To create a product, click the Create a New Product link. You will see these three options:

• Product Type — There are four options to choose from, which WHMCS uses to determine how to handle the product. This is only for system use; you use the groups to divide products into categories for your own use.
  • Shared Hosting — For web hosting accounts.
  • Reseller Hosting — For web hosting reseller accounts.
  • Dedicated/VPS Server — For servers. This displays the server hostname, nameserver, and root password fields on signup.
  • Other — For anything else.
• Product Group — The group the product belongs to for display on the order form.
• Product Name — The name to display to customers and throughout the admin area.

After you create the product, the following options will be available for configuration. To edit a product at a later date, click the corresponding Edit icon on the Products/Services page.

To customise display sorting, see Sorting.

Details Tab

This is the first tab you see. It contains general information about a product, including its name and product group.

• Product Type, Product Group and Product Name — See the Products section above.
• Product Description — The detailed information on the order form, which relates to this product.
  • Note: The system maintains line breaks when you format a description. When using HTML, we recommend avoiding new lines unless you want them to appear in the end result.
• Welcome Email — The email template to send when activating the product. You can create custom email templates to use on different products. For more information, see Email Templates.
• Require Domain — The domain registration options on ordering. You should always enable this for hosting and disable it for any other products that don't require a domain name.
• Stock Control — The specific available quantity of an item (for example, servers) or a limited special-offer product. Check this to enable it, and then enter the remaining quantity. WHMCS will stop orders when it reaches zero.
• Sort Order — A number that overrides the default product ordering of alphabetical names. For example, a product with sort order of 0 will appear in the list first, with 1 will be beneath that and 2 beneath that.
• Apply Tax — Whether to apply tax rules to this product. For more information, see Tax/VAT Rules.
• Hidden — Whether to show the product on the order form. Customers will still be able to order this using the direct order links.
• Retire — Whether to hide the product from admin area lists, such as the Products/Services menu in the client's Products/Services tab.

Pricing Tab

This second tab lets you specify the prices and duration of the product.

Price Grid

• Payment Types — Free, One Time, and Recurring options.
  • When you select One Time or Recurring payment types, the pricing grid will appear for entry of the product price. Enable each billing cycle by checking the corresponding Enable checkbox.
  • For Free products, the grid will not appear, since you cannot specify a price for a free product.
  • For One Time products, enable the One Time/Monthly column and enter your prices into that column.
  • For Recurring pricing types, you can choose from several billing cycles depending on how often you want to bill clients. You can enable as many or as few as you like.
  • The setup fee in each column allows you to specify different setup fees depending on the cycle you choose. For example, you may charge setup fees on monthly cycles and offer free setup for yearly cycles.
  • If you do not wish to offer a particular billing cycle, deselect the Enable checkbox to disable it. In this screenshot, the product will only be available monthly or annually with no setup fee.
• Allow Multiple Quantities — When you enable it, this option allows clients to choose the quantity of this product they wish to order. This is available on the checkout page. The product must require no additional configuration (like product custom fields or configurable options).
• Recurring Cycles Limit — For Recurring payment types, the default value (0) will invoice indefinitely until cancelled. However, by entering a value in this field, you can limit the number of times this product will invoice the client. For example, entering 5 on a monthly product would keep the system from generating an invoice in the 6th month after ordering.
• Auto Terminate/Fixed Term — You can set up products that automatically terminate after a set number of days from the service's Registration Date. Use this to offer free trial products for a certain period of time or time-limited products that should only recur for a certain number of cycles before stopping.
  • To enable this, enter the number of days to wait before terminating and choose an email template to send to the client when the termination occurs (for example, an up-selling email to promote your paid products in the case of a trial, or confirmation of payment completing for installment payments). Set the Auto Terminate/Fixed Term value to 0 to disable this feature.
  • Entering a number in this field terminate the product when the cron job runs that many days after the product registration date.
• Termination Email — When you enable the above option, choose an email to send to the client at product termination.

• Prorata Billing — This allows you to bill products on a specific day of the month and charge a prorata amount at the initial time of order. If you enable this, the system will charge all clients on one exact day each month. Otherwise, the product will use the default anniversary billing system (for example, Jun 15–Jul 15).

• Prorata Date — If you set this to 1, the system will charge all clients on the 1st of each month.
• Charge Next Month — After this day of the month, the system will also charge a client for the next month in their initial payment when signing up on a monthly billing cycle. Without enabling this, if you have set the prorata date to 1, and a client signs up on the 30th of the month, they would only pay a small amount. If you enable this, they would pay the prorated amount plus the next month in advance.
  TIP: If you wish to prorate a product but not to enable this feature, set "Prorata Date" to a normal value and "Charge Next Month" to 32.

Module Settings (aka Provisioning)

This tab specifies which server type the product will use and how WHMCS will behave when someone orders this product.

• From the Module Name menu, select the type of server you're using.
• Select your desired options. The options you will see depend upon the module chosen. For more information about each module, see the Provisioning Modules section.
• If a product has no specific module to link to, set it to "Autorelease" in order to simulate the activation and send a welcome email automatically.
• Select one of the four automation settings for product activation:
  • Automatically setup the product as soon as an order is placed — Set it up instantly. Usually, you would use this for free products.
  • Automatically setup the product as soon as the first payment is received — Perform the setup as soon as the customer pays for the order.
  • Automatically setup the product when you manually accept a pending order — Perform the setup only when an admin has manually reviewed and accepted the order.
  • Do not automatically setup this product — Never auto-set up the product. Admins can still initiate manually from the product details page under a clients profile.

Metric Billing

The Metric Billing section displays when you select a module that supports this feature (WHMCS version 7.9 and above).

To enable a metric for billing or display purposes, set the toggle to On. If you enable a metric, it will appear within the client's product details view of the client area. An admin will always see all metrics, enabled or disabled, within the admin area when viewing a service for a product that reports metrics.

To configure pricing for a metric, click "Configure Pricing" under the given metric name.

For usage and configuration instructions, see Usage Billing.

Custom Fields

From this tab you can create custom fields for this product. This allows you to collect additional order form information that you need to supply the product.

• Field types consist of text boxes, menus, yes-or-no checkboxes, memo text boxes, and password fields. Text in password fields appear as asterisks (****).
• You can set fields as admin-only for private data, required or optional on the order form, displayed on the order form, displayed in the client area, or displayed on invoices (such as VAT numbers).

For more information, see Custom Fields.

Configurable Options

Use this tab to select which configurable options to associate with the product. You can display them on the order form or in the client area.

• Configurable Options allow you to give your clients options that alter the price of the product.
• For more information, see Addons & Configurable Options.

Upgrades

The sixth tab allows you to specify whether the client can upgrade or downgrade from this product to another.

• WHMCS can fully automate upgrades and downgrades for many of the modules.
• In this tab, select the products that the product can be upgrade or downgrade to.
• Use Ctrl+Click to select multiple products.
• Select the checkbox to enable the upgrades of configurable options, if there are any on the product.
• Select an email template to use when a client upgrades to this product from the Upgrade Email menu. You will first need to create a new Product email template under Setup > Email Templates.
• For more information about how WHMCS calculates and processes upgrades and downgrades, see Automated Upgrades and Downgrades.

Free Domain

Use this tab to configure the offer of a free domain with a product.

• WHMCS lets you offer free domains with your packages when customers purchase them with certain payment terms. For example, you might want to offer a free domain when someone purchases a package annually.
• For more information on how to configure this, see Offering Free Domain Registration.

Other

The penultimate tab contains miscellaneous settings such as product affiliate rates, product downloads, and overage billing.

• Custom Affiliate Payout — The custom payout rate for this specific product if using the built-in affiliate system. This setting overrides or disables the system default commission rate.
• Affiliate Pay Amount — The percentage or amount paid for a purchase of this product, depending on your choice for the setting above.
• One Time Payout — Whether to pay only a one-time commission.
• Subdomain Options — Enter a domain in the format ".yourdomain.com" if you want to offer a free subdomain option for the domain at signup. You can offer more than one by entering a comma separated list (for example, ".yourdomain.com,.yourdomain.net").
• Product Downloads — Whether to offer files to automatically release to the customer when the product is activated. See Product Downloads Distribution for more information.
• Overage Billing — Allows you to bill for the product based on disk and bandwidth usage for the month. Refer to Disk Space and Bandwidth Overage Billing for more information.

Links tab

The final tab contains some ready-made URLs to add to linking to this product.

• Each URL will add the product to the shopping cart and jump straight to the configuration step.
• There are many more possible variations. For more information, see Linking to WHMCS.

Sorting

Groups and Products are sortable using the crosshair icon on the appropriate row. This is on the left for Groups and the right for Products.

After moving, a success message will appear on the top right of the page to confirm that the system saved the sort order.

It is not possible to move products between groups using the drag-and-drop method.

Feature Highlights

Feature Highlights allow you to define features and their values for products in a way that WHMCS can interpret for comparison-based display.

The system supports Feature Highlights for most order form templates. For more information, see Standard Order Form Templates.