Knowledge Base: Sellers, Sites, and Product Families

Sellers

If you have a Chargify account, you are a Seller. When you sign up with Chargify, you receive a Seller Account. Sellers_within Chargify are sometimes also called Merchants_.

You provide us with your Company or Organization name at the time you sign up. This is the name that may be presented to your customers if you use our hosted payment pages, default email receipts, etc. You may change this value at any time.

Sites

A site is a container for your Products, Subscriptions, and Customers that all share the same settings. Additionally, all reporting is done across an entire site, and cannot span sites.

The shared settings consist of things like payment gateway credentials, mode (test vs. live), email settings, subdomain, and more.

Typically, you'll probably want just 2 sites: one for testing and one for production. But, there are plenty of situations where you'll want more sites.

For example, you may sign up for Chargify for your "parent" company, but have 2 separate web apps that are not necessarily related. You may have two merchant accounts and payment gateways so that the charges appear from different "merchants of record". In this case, you would definitely want a site for each of your apps.

Having two apps does not necessitate multiple sites - you can easily set up multiple Product Families (one for each app), each with several products (or plans, or levels), on a single Site.

The name of you Site is not typically shown to your customers. When you customize your email templates, you will have access to variables for your "merchant name", "site name", "product family name", and "product name". None of the stock email templates makes use of the "site name" variable.

Product Families

Product Families hold your Products (which can also typically be referred to as Plans). If you allow your customers to upgrade and downgrade their plan, they will be upgrading or downgrading to different Products within the same Product Family.