Products and services can be effectively managed in Chargebee using Product Catalog. Product Families, Plans, Addons, Charges, Coupons, and Coupon sets form a Product Catalog. You can create plans in Chargebee with each plan corresponding to a specific set of product or service features, that your customers would subscribe to.
Your customers would be signed-up for plans by way of subscriptions.
Scenario: Acme Inc. is a business that sells online storage solutions. While some users would intend to use the service for personal use, others may be business users. Acme could create a home plan that provides basic features, and a higher-priced professional plan for advanced features.
In addition to creating plans, you can define multiple price points to each plan for various currencies and billing frequencies. In the above example, Acme can create multiple price points for the Home Plan like Home Plan Monthly USD, Home Plan Yearly USD, Home Plan Monthly INR, Home Plan Yearly INR, and so on.
You can use price points to control the plan's availability in currencies based on the geographies and the billing frequencies in which you are selling products and services.
Configuring Product Catalog Settings
After configuring your organization and currency settings, it is important that you define billing frequency at a site level, based on your business needs. To configure billing frequency, follow these step:
In the Product Catalog Settings page, click Manage under Setup Billing Frequency.
All frequencies are selected by default. Select your preferred billing frequencies, based on which you will be able to create Plans and Addons. You can select from Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, and you can even add custom frequencies.
Click Apply.
Note
You can create plans and addons only for the billing frequencies that are defined under the Essential Settings.
Creating a Plan
To create a new plan in your Chargebee site, follow these step:
Click Product Catalog > Plans > + Create Plan.
In the Create a New Plan page, click the Product Family dropdown and select the product family to which you want to associate the plan.
Specify an Internal Name for the plan that helps you to identify the plan internally. It is the name used to refer to the plan on your Chargebee site.
You can add a Description to include additional details about the plan.
The Plan ID is generated based on the Internal Name that you specify. You can modify this id as required. A plan Id is the unique identifier of the Plan and when a Subscription is created or updated via the API from your application or website.
Select This plan is metered if you are using the Metered Billing feature in Chargebee to add usage-based charges to subscriptions of this plan. Invoices created for this plan are in a draft state. You can add usage to the subscriptions before closing the invoices. You can additionally override the site settings that you have configured for how you would like Chargebee to process the usage data that you share for this plan. You can select your preferred option to be either the sum of all usage data or the most recent usage data.
Under Customer-Facing Info, you can do the following:
Enable the Display in Self-Serve Portal checkbox to make this plan available in the self-serve portal. The Self-serve Portal can be used by your customers to make changes to their subscription.
Enable the Display in Checkout checkbox to make this plan available in Checkout. When this setting is enabled, your customers can subscribe to this plan using Checkout.
You can specify a Redirect URL for this plan. Chargebee redirects your customers to this URL (say your website or any other page that you specify) once they complete the checkout successfully.
Click Create.
See also
Custom Fields for more information on creating custom fields for plans and addons.
Bulk Operations for more information on importing sizeable volumes of your plans, addons, price points, and other subscription data into Chargebee.
Note
The Orders feature and shippable plans/addons are not supported in sites that are on Product Catalog 2.0 as yet.
Defining Price Points for Plan
After creating plans, you can start adding multiple price points for each plan. Your customers can choose a relevant price point for the plan based on their needs.
Using price points you can:
Create variations of the same plan for different currency and billing frequency combinations.
Avoid creating or cloning the same plan for multiple currencies and billing frequencies, create price points instead.
Maintain a clean and sleek product catalog and avoid clutter.
To define a price point for a plan, follow these steps:
Click Product Catalog > Plans. Select the plan for which you are creating the price points.
In the details page, the Pricing section displays all the billing frequencies that you have added for your site for every currency configured.
Go to the billing frequency for the currency that you want to add for this plan, and click Set Price.
In the Create a Price Point page, you can modify the basic attributes of the plan's price point such as:
External Name: Specify an external name to this price point used on all customer-facing resources such as Invoice, Quotes, Checkout, and Self-serve Portal.
Internal Name: The internal name is used to refer to the plan price point on your Chargebee site.
Plan Price Point ID: The Plan Price Point ID is generated based on the Internal Name that you specify. You can click and edit this field. This Id is the unique identifier of the plan price point and when a subscription is created or updated via the API from your application or website, the "ID" is used to refer to the plan point.
Select This plan has a trial period checkbox, and enter the duration a subscription can be in trial mode. Depending on the payment gateway you use, after the trial period is over, the initial charge may go through. Read more about trial periods.
In the Pricing section, you can configure the pricing attributes of the plan's price point such as:
Pricing Model: Choose your preferred pricing model in which you want to charge your customers for consuming this plan.
Price: Based on the pricing model that you choose, you can specify the price for the plan's price point.
Free quantity: This option is only available when you specify the pricing model for the price point as Per Unit. Free quantity is the number of goods you would like to give to your customers at no extra charge. You or your customer can specify the total quantity of goods at the time of purchase. Example If a customer is signing up for a special discounted plan that offers 10GB data at no charge. Price - $2 per GB Free Quantity - 10 GB Subscribed Quantity - 100 GB Quantity Chargeable - 90 GB Charged Amount = $2 x 90 = $180 So this customer will only be charged for 90 GB of storage space. If the free quantity is more than the subscribed quantity, then the plan will be considered as a free plan, and the buyer will not be charged at all for their subscription. For the above example, if the subscribed quantity was say, 10 GB, then it would be a free subscription.
Billing Cycles: Define the number of billing cycles that determine the default number of times the subscription is renewed automatically. You can select from the following options:
Fixed number of billings cycles and specify the number. The number set should be inclusive of the first billing cycle.
Forever to allow the subscription renewal to happen forever.
Under Customer facing info, you can do the following:
Add a description to the price point which gets displayed on all customer-facing resources such as Invoices, Quotes, Checkout, and Self-serve Portal.
Enable the Show Plan Description in Invoices and Show Plan Description in Quotes options, if you want the PDF format of the invoices and quotes that are generated for subscriptions of this plan to display the plan description in the respective line item. By displaying plan description, your customers can get more clarity on their subscriptions at a glance.
Additionally, specify Invoice notes that will appear in all the invoice PDFs that are generated for this plan's price point.
Taxes: If Taxes have been configured, you can choose to exempt a plan price point from taxes by unchecking This plan price point is subject to taxes. If you are choosing to keep the plan taxable, choose a tax profile for it. This would determine — during invoicing — what taxes are applied to the price of the plan.
Accounting Information: The Accounting Information section helps Chargebee sync up with any accounting applications that you integrate with, like Xero and QuickBooks. Each of the accounting fields captures information that helps track product-specific sales/revenue from an accounting perspective.
SKU: Store Keeping Unit or SKU is a name used to identify a product/service in inventory management or accounting systems. You can use this as an alternative name for your plan and it will be used as the Product Name in the accounting system.
Accounting code: This field captures your Accounting systems' General Ledger Account code/name. When product information is synced to the Accounting system, the product-specific information will be synced with this account as captured here. This is a mandatory field. You cannot proceed with accounting integration if this field is left blank.
Accounting category: The Accounting Category captures product-specific additional metadata or categorization for reporting purposes in the accounting systems (such as regions you are selling to or branches you are selling from). It should be entered in the specific format. E.g. "Region: Northern"
Click Create.
You can define multiple price points for each plan, for all the currencies and billing frequencies in which you want to offer your plans.
Note
For invoices generated for existing plans without the Show Plan Description in Invoices option enabled, the PDF does not display the plan description. You can edit the plan to enable this option. After the setting is enabled, the invoice PDFs that get generated or regenerated will display the plan description.
If you want to include plan description for a previously generated invoice, you can:
A credit note (PDF) that is generated from an invoice with the plan description will also display the plan description (whether or not the Show Plan Description in Invoices option is enabled for the plan, at the time of credit note creation).
In case of Advance Invoicing, the plan description gets displayed only once in the invoice PDF.
Pricing Models
The price of the plan is set according to the pricing model chosen for the Plan. The pricing model can be one of the following:
Flat fee: This is for plans that have a fixed recurring charge. There is no quantity associated with such plans.
Per Unit: You may choose to sell services that are billed based on the quantity signed-up for. For instance, you may be offering a SaaS product for $29 per user per month. The quantity here would be the number of users. The customer can specify the plan quantity during sign-up through the hosted pages or – if you are using API – then you may use the Create Subscription API call.
Tiered: In tiered pricing also, the per-unit prices are assigned to quantity-based ranges (tiers). When calculating the total price, quantities are purchased from successive tiers, starting from the lowest.
Volume: Here too, the price is quantity-based. However, the per-unit price is dependent on the range within which the total quantity falls. So under this model, you would define the quantity ranges and the per-unit price for each.
Stair-step: Stair-step pricing also defines quantity tiers against which prices are defined, but for each tier, a flat price is assigned instead of a per-unit price.
Plan Actions
Edit Plan
This action allows you to change the plan configuration. The 'Plan Id' and 'This is a gift plan' fields for a plan cannot be changed once the plan has been created.
Delete Plan
A plan can only be deleted when it has no plan price points defined for it.
Once deleted, the plan is completely removed from Chargebee and it does not appear on the list of plans.
Once a plan is deleted, its name and Id can be reused.
Archive Plan
A plan that has subscriptions linked to it cannot be deleted, but can be archived instead. This way the plan – though not deleted – is prevented from being used for new subscriptions.
When you archive a plan, all associated price points get archived automatically. Similarly, when you activate an archived plan, all associated price points are activated automatically.
Any existing subscriptions to the plan are not affected post archiving: they continue to renew as usual.
The name or Id of the plan cannot be reused when the plan is archived.
Plan Price Point Actions
Edit Price Point
This action allows you to change the price point configuration. The Plan Price Point Id and the Pricing Model for a price point cannot be changed once the price point has been defined. Editing a price point differs based on whether subscriptions are created for the price point or not.
If there are no subscriptions attached to the plan price point, then every attribute (except Price point Id) can be changed.
If subscriptions are attached to the price point then everything except the following can be changed:
