Subscribing Customers to Service Plans

The next step is placing a sales order.

Note: You can also create a customer account and subscribe the customer to a service plan simultaneously by clicking Create Account and Place Order.

To create a sales order for a customer:

1. Go to Operations > Orders. Click Add New Order. Complete the form:
   • Click next to the Account field. From the window that opens, select the account you want to create the order for.

   • Click next to the Service Plan field. From the window that opens, select a service plan to order. To create a reseller, select a service plan based on a reseller service template.

     Important: Service plans which are incompatible with any of the service plans to which the customer is already subscribed, will have a warning message displayed in the Additional Information column. Such warning messages do not prohibit the selection of an incompatible service plan for ordering. However, when you try to place the order, an error message will be returned. For more information, please see Configuring Resource Dependencies and Viewing Incompatible Service Plans.

   • Click next to the Subscription Period field. From the window that opens, select a subscription period to subscribe customer to.

   • If selected service plan is configured as up-sale to another service plan, click next to the Parent Subscription field. From the window that opens, select a parent subscription. There are only subscriptions of selected customer presented in the list. If you subscribe customer to a basic service plan, leave the field as is.

     Note: up-sales list is configured for each service plan individually. To make a service plan presented in the parent subscriptions list, it is necessary to include appropriate up-sale category in the up-sales list of the parent subscription service plan. For more information on managing up-sales, please, refer to the Forming Service Plan Up-sales List section earlier in this guide.

   • Type a free-form order description into the Comments field. This description will be shown to customer in order header.
   • Type the promotion code into the Promotion Code field if the service plan participates in a promotion campaign.
   • If necessary, click next to the Sales Branch field. From the window that opens, select a sales branch to assign to the order.

   • If necessary, click next to the Sales Person field. From the window that opens, select a sales person to assign to the order. The sales branch and sales person specified in order are inherited by invoice.

     Note: if sales branch and sales person are not specified in the order, invoice inherits these settings from the account. If you specify these settings in the order while it is not provisioned, an invoice inherits sales branch and sales person settings from the order. Also you can change these settings directly in the invoice.

     Important: keep in mind that in case when sales branch and sales person were specified in the sales order, them will be accounted only for this order; that is, the following orders will inherit the sales branch and sales person settings from the account.

2. Click Next >> to proceed to the next wizard step. If the service plan you subscribe customer to is based on a service template requiring some special parameters to be input, in the next wizard step you input these parameters. We have taken a service plan containing domain services as an example. Otherwise, it is the order confirmation screen – you may proceed to the 7th step right away.
3. In case of domain purchase or transfer, select respective operation type from the Operation Type list.
4. Type a domain name into the Domain Name field. In case of domain transfer, domain name that you have input will be registered on provider's name servers.
5. Click Next >> to proceed to the order confirmation screen.

6. Review the order details and click Place Order.

   Important: If the service plan that you chose is incompatible with any of the service plans to which the customer is already subscribed, CloudBlue Commerce will return an error message. For more information, please see Configuring Resource Dependencies and Viewing Incompatible Service Plans.

7. When Order is created from provider panel, it is assigned the New status on creation, i.e., order processing hasn't started yet. Thus, the New status allows you to check order details and make necessary corrections. For example, add or remove a non-provisioning item to the order, add or remove provisioning items, change payment method used for paying up the order, etc. In case customer has paid with a check or a bank transfer, you have to create respective payment and apply it to order.
8. Usually, the order is created with the New status (it can differ depending on order flow setting). If the order requires no amendment, click Open Orderto approve services provisioning. If customer has one of his payment methods configured for automatic payments and you have not changed payment that is to be applied, the order will be automatically paid and services provisioning will start.

Purchased subscription appears in the customer Subscriptions tab. Depending on selected service plan customer account is moved to the resellers list or remains in the customers list.