Define your Products
Your product is essentially a collection of plans that your customer will subscribe to. So, if I had a consultancy company, my product would be a Consultancy Subscription and I could offer multiple plans, such as Basic and Premium. I can then set my cycles to charge the correct amount in the specified timeframe, such as $200 per month for the basic plan. If I wanted to give a discount to customers who pay annually, I could configure a cycle on this same plan that charges $2000 per year.
A product can only be one currency and this currency cannot be changed. So, if you charge in multiple currencies you'll need to create a product for each of these. For example, consider a video streaming service that sells its service in the US in Dollars and in the UK in Pounds. They'll need to configure two completely separate products: Video Streaming US and Video Streaming UK. For each of these products they have three plans: Gold, Silver and Bronze, and for each of these plans they offer the choice two cycles: Monthly or Annual.
Let's use this example to configure the Video Streaming US product in Billsby.
Add a new product
When you first navigate to Products > Products, plans and Cycles in the left hand menu, you'll see a button that says Create your first product and plan:
Tell us the Basics
Your product has a Name and a Display name. The Name is how we'll refer to the product in your Billsby account and the Display name is the name that we'll show to your customers. So, in this example the Name is Video Streaming US and the Display name will simply be Video Streaming.
This is also where you'll let us know which currency you want to charge this product in and add any product images that we'll display to your customers during the checkout flow.
Let us know what information to collect
We require some information from the customers who sign up for your product so, during the checkout process we will ask them to complete three mandatory fields - Name, Email and Address. You can decide here whether you want to take a shipping address as well as a billing address and whether you want to permit customers from certain countries only using the edit icon next to Address:
Depending on what information you would like to collect from the customer when they sign up, you can also add any additional fields either from our standard fields or by creating your own custom fields.
Change your advanced product settings
In the advanced settings you can choose who you want to be able to see your products:
Public
This makes the product publicly available through your chosen channels.
Hidden
This removes the product from your chosen channel and makes it hidden, so that only you can see it. If your customers initiate a checkout they will not be shown this product unless you’ve referred to it in the embed code, or referenced it in the API. This is useful for promotional products; student discounts or voucher codes, etc.
Internal
This ensures that the product can only be accessed through the control panel. For example, this could be used for retention products, or out-of-date products that are no longer on sale but are still available to manage.
Off-Sale
This function archives the product, so that is no longer available anywhere.
BCC email
When you configure the emails your customers receive, you can choose to have them copied to your BCC email. After configuring the email address here, go to email settings to choose which emails you’d like to be copied in on.
Once you've done all of this, you can click on Create product and move on creating one or more plans for your customers to subscribe to.
Add your first plan
Now, we'll need to create our first plan that will sit under this product: the Gold plan:
Tell us the basics
Just like products, plans also have a Name and a Display name. It's useful to add any additional information in the description that might answer some of the questions your customers may have about your plan.
Pick your pricing model
There are a range of different pricing models you can use when configuring your plans, including flat fee, per unit, volume based, tiered and ranged. Once you've chosen your pricing model you cannot change it. For most fields you have to fill out in Billsby we give you useful tips in the box to the right hand side of the section - you may find this useful when you need more information on what we're asking for:
Let us know what your plan costs
It's in this section that you'll be prompted to create your cycles.
In our example, we have two cycles on the Gold plan: Monthly and Annual. Let's start by creating the Monthly plan.
Your Price will be the recurring charge of the plan, so for our monthly charge we have it set of $200 every month. You can do more with your cycle though!
The Free trial is a period of time where our system will not bill the user automatically, which will delay both the set-up fee and the price until the end of the trial
The Set-up fee is an additional one-time charge that is processed on sign up, and this will be in addition to the price of the plan depending on your set-up
The Billing date will give you an option of Anniversary of sign up as shown here, which will bill the customer on sign up, and have their recurring billing date be on the day that they signed up. Alternatively, you can have the date set to a fixed date, where you can set a date for all customers on that plan to billed (you'll also then have options to pro-rate just in case a customer doesn't sign up on the fixed date!
The Minimum term will let your customers know there's a contractual period - this just means they won't be able to cancel themselves whilst they're in this term. This doesn't affect as you can still cancel on their behalf
Finally, the Visibility gives you a choice of Public or Hidden. With hidden, the price of the plan won't be visible to customers at the checkout. It's recommended that you always have Public as your option here.
But that's our Monthly cycle done! Now we can click Add a cycle and then configure the annual cycle.
Link add-ons and allowances to your plan
In this section, if you have any add-ons and allowances, you can link them to this specific plan. Not to worry if you haven't created any yet, you can come back to this at any point and link them once they're created!
Advanced plan settings
In this section, you're able to do a little more customization!
Feature tags when applied will link all customers and subscriptions on this plan to be call-able via an API, For example, a gym might check for the 'water' feature tag when a customer enters their membership number at the water vending machine
BCC email has the same functionality as the Product BCC email you may have entered before, but you can have specific plans have notifications go to individual emails, rather than having all plans linked to one!
Redirect URL will allow you to post a URL that will send the customer to that page once the checkout is complete.
The Visibility of the plan is only between Public and Hidden, much like the cycle. However, Hidden here means the plan and the corresponding cycles won't show in your checkout. Great for anything you have internal use only!
Once you're happy with everything, you can click Create plan to confirm everything and your products, plans, and cycles will be all ready to go!