What is the relationship and differences between Accounts, Sites, Product Families, and Products

Note: the Site features are not fully implemented in the Beta at this time, but this is what we are working towards

Accounts

You create an Account when you sign up for Chargify. Your account is what we bill according to our pricing plans.

Sites

Sites are used to offer and sell products. You initially start out with no Sites. You must create a Site in order to create Products to sell. You may create multiple Sites.

Each Site:

• Has its own subdomain (i.e. https://mysite.chargify.com)
• Has separate settings (i.e. you may use separate Payment Gateways on separate sites)
• May be independently placed in test mode or live mode.
• May compare data (Product revenue, etc) only within the same Site

Product Families

Product Families are like containers for your Products. If you run a subscription service, your Products may be your plans. Your customers may upgrade and downgrade between the different Products within a Product Family. Your customers can not own more than one Product within the Family (unless they sign up as a different Customer).

How should I set up my Sites/Product Families/Products?

It depends, let's look at some different scenarios.

Take Chargify for example. We currently have 1 Site called "Chargify", with one Product Family called "Chargify". Within that Family are our Plans (Products). You are only on one plan at a time, but you may move between them.

Now let's say we're Acme Corporation, and we have two web applications: a project management suite called "AcmeProjects" and a CRM called "AcmeCRM". Our Acme brand is strong, and our customers often sign up for both of our services. In this case, we might make a single Site called "Acme", and two Product Families: AcmeProjects and AcmeCRM. This way, our customers might be able to sign up both services and we treat them as one customer/user/login on both our own site and on Chargify. We would be able to compare sales data directly between AcmeProjects and AcmeCRM. Our customer's credit cards would show charges from the same entity (Acme Corp) for both products. (Note: Chargify does not aggregate charges.)

On the other hand, let's consider a case where the AcmeProjects and AcmeCRM brands are strong on their own right, and we wish to keep them more separated. Perhaps we have 2 different merchant accounts and we want the credit card charges to show up separately as AcmeProjects and AcmeCRM. In this case, we might create two Sites, each with their own subdomain and one Product Family within each.

Why do you call them "Products", and not "Plans"

Chargify makes it easy to sell other things that are not plan-based, such as Sponsorships or e-books. Often, these things might belong to separate Product Families along side your normal recurring service offerings. Plans just seemed too restrictive.

Just think of it this way: If your customers can pay for it, its a Product. If they can upgrade/downgrade to another Product, then those Products are part of the same Product Family.