A reseller is a company that purchases services from a provider with the intention to resell them to customers for profit rather than consume or use them. Resellers do not have their own infrastructure; therefore, to sell cloud services, they refer to a provider.
A reseller subscription is an agreement between a provider and a reseller on how they will do business. It typically includes all aspects of provider-reseller relationships – what services the reseller will sell, how much the reseller will pay, and so on. In CloudBlue Commerce, a reseller contract is represented by means of a reseller subscription.
In the system, the contract is represented by the following objects:
- A list of delegated service plans, given to a reseller through a subscription to a reseller service plan.
- A list of resources, given to a reseller through a subscription to a reseller service plan.
- Prices of these service plans and discounts defined for the reseller account.
- Recurring fees included in a reseller subscription and extra options and prices for them.
- Credit limit defined per reseller account.
- Statement day defined per reseller account – a day when a monthly invoice will be issued.
Why do providers need resellers?
- Sales expansion. As a provider, you can extend the representation of your company in other countries or regions without building your own sales organizations there.
- Service branding. Your services are promoted under different brands in various countries or regions.
- Selling in another currency. Reseller sales structure will allow you to sell your services in different countries or regions in the respective currency.
- Region-specific aspects such as taxation and documentation flow.
Providers profit from resellers by providing them with:
- The infrastructure to manage accounts, customer subscriptions, offers, orders, and AR documents.
- A set of resources to build their own offers or ready-for-sales offers (delegated service plans).
- A payment system. Customers pay to a provider and then the provider returns a profit margin to the reseller. In this workflow, resellers typically represent “partners” of the provider to customers. Customers know that they are working with the provider “through” the reseller (for example, due to a local presence of the reseller, support, sales, and so on).
For more information about reseller management, please refer to the Getting Started with Resellers Guide.