Product Families 

Overview 

When your business offers multiple products or services, each with its own set of plans and addons, managing or scaling your product catalog could become challenging. You can manage this complexity by creating product families in Chargebee, that help you categorize your plans and addons for specific product or service that is offered to your customers.

For example, Acme Inc is a SaaS(Software as a Service) business that provides software applications like Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) and Human Resource Management Software (HRMS) to other businesses. Each application has two different plans to choose from - Standard and Enterprise. Acme Inc. also offers additional users and implementation support for the applications.

Product Families allow for grouping these different plans (product levels), addons, and charges into clusters that belong to specific products. For instance, in the above example, product families are CRM and HRMS. Plans, addons, and charges can be created and associated with respective product families.

You can present your plans and addons to customers contextually based on these product families. Your customers can only upgrade or downgrade between plans within the same product family.

Configuring Product Family 

Product Families setting is enabled by default in your Chargebee site for users to create product families and associate plans and addons to them.

If your business does not require creating multiple product families, you can simply create one family and associate all your plans, addons, and charges to this product family.

Creating a Product Family 

You can start creating product families and categorizing your plans and addons under these product families.

To create a new product family, follow these steps:

1. Click Product Catalog > Product Families > + Create Product Family.
2. In the Create a Product Family page, enter the product family name, description, and modify the product family id(if required).
3. Click Create.

Once you create the product families as required, you can associate plans, addons, and charges with the respective product families while creating or editing them.

Editing a Product Family 

To edit an existing product family, follow these steps:

1. Click Product Catalog > Product Families.
2. From the list of product families, navigate to the record that you wish to edit, click the more icon and click Edit Product Family.
3. On the Edit Product Family page, you can edit the product family name and description.
4. Click Update.

FAQ 

What are some factors that I need to consider before grouping my plans and addons into product families? 

If you have multiple products or services, each with its own set of plans and addons, consider the following factors before you group them into product families:

• Migrating subscriptions from one plan to another plan is possible only when the plans belong to the same product family. Otherwise, the existing subscription needs to be canceled, and a new subscription has to be created with the plan from another family.
• Addons and charges are only applicable to the plans within the respective product family. If the same addons and charges are required for plans in other product families as well, you have to create them again in the respective product families.
• By creating the same addons, charges, and coupons in multiple product families, the reports reflect the consumption of these addons, charges, and coupons split across different product families. If you require consolidated reports on their consumption, we suggest that you manage all your plans, addons, charges, and coupons within a single product family.