Let's consider an example of how you would prepare to sell the web hosting service from a bottom-up approach.
Each service includes resources that you are going to allocate to your customers. For example, for web hosting you need to provide your customers with a web server (such as Apache), support for a server-side programming language (such as PHP), databases (such as MySQL), the ability to connect to a webspace using FTP, the ability to download the website's log files, the ability to create backups of webspaces and databases, and so on. The resources are represented in CloudBlue Commerce as resource types.
The resources for a particular service are all related and cannot be sold separately. When you open a service provider's End-Customer Marketplace, you are unlikely to see that resources are offered separately. Usually, resources are sold in the form of a plan. In CloudBlue Commerce, resources are combined in a service template. For example, to sell web hosting, you need to create a web hosting service template in CloudBlue Commerce. The service template defines resource limits, defining the available amount of each resource allocated to a customer.
In the End-Customer Marketplace, you usually see service plans with various subscription periods (for example, a monthly subscription, a quarterly subscription and so on) and prices. In CloudBlue Commerce, a ready-for-sale commercial offer is represented as a service plan. Each service plan is based on a service template.
With CloudBlue Commerce, you can configure your own End-Customer Marketplace and publish the prepared service plans in it.
When a customer purchases a service plan, the system creates a subscription to this service for a selected period of time. The subscription defines all services and resources allocated to an account during the defined period, for a particular price.
You should carry out the following steps to configure a service for sale.
This section provides general information about the configuration of service offerings.