Product Lines

Product Lines allow you to map existing products into tiers (i.e. Bronze, Silver, Gold) within a single family to allow easy upgrades & downgrades.

Product Line definitions have two main purposes.

1. They affect how products are displayed in linked commerce portals. (i.e. a bronze, silver, gold, portfolio of products within the same family would be displayed sequentially in a product pricing page)

2. They allow for the definition of business rules for upgrades & downgrades between tiers of a product line. (i.e. allow upgrades, but don't allow downgrades within a given product line)

Figure 1. Creating a New Product Family

• Line Name - used to categorize all of the products that will be added to the line. For example: "Insurance Products"

• Tier Number: This field accepts any number greater than zero. Lower numbers should be used for the cheapest, entry level plans, and the highest number represents your most expensive plan. These numbers are used by the business logic rules that determine whether a move from one tier to another is an upgrade (going from lower number to higher number) or a downgrade (the reverse).

• Tier Name: A name that may be exposed in front-end commerce portals to your end subscribers : Example tier names would be: "Starter / Growth / Professional"

• Associated Product: Here you select from an existing Product that has been created in advance. This creates a link from the product line to the actual product.