Difference between revisions of "Products and Services"

Revision as of 20:58, 8 March 2008

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.

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.

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?

Setting up configurable options is easy. Here's how:

Navigate to the Products & Services configuration page and click the edit icon next to the product or service you want to add configurable options to
Click the Configurable Options tab at the top of the page
Next to the "Add Config Option" heading, enter the name for your option. In this example we are using "Disk Space"
Then click Save Changes
You'll now see Disk Space listed as an option with the first option "Default" and a setup fee and monthly price of zero (0)
You can now edit the "Default" value to read 500MB (or whatever your default option is going to be eg. Yes, 250GB, cPanel, etc...)
You can also set a default price but usually this would be a zero price and the default recurring cost would be for the default options
You can then add furthur options in the box next to the "Add Option" heading, enter the name, then setup fee, then monthly price, and then click Save Changes to add it
Repeat step 8 until you have added all the options you want and then you can go back to step 3 to add your next configurable option

Note: In the Monthly Price field, you enter the cost per month for that selection. If the user then chooses to pay Annually for the product, it would be multipled by 12. Likewise if they chose to pay Quarterly, it would be multipled by 3.

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:

File: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:

File: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

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