Understanding Product/Offer Structure in WebForce- Part 1

Purpose:

The purpose of this walkthrough is to help you understand the differences between creating an offer, subscription plan, and product variations.  

Pre Requisites:

• An active account

• Subscription plans 

Over the years, WebForce has had the opportunity to work with multiple businesses. From start-ups, all the way to enterprise businesses, to help them streamline and organize their online tech stack.

One thing noticed across all is that everybody has a different level of organization & structure, especially the way their products and offers are set up. Often it's a function of the limitations from a previous CRM, Marketplace, or tool the team was using when they created that product.

For example, working with previous CRM'S, we’ve seen businesses create duplicate listings of products or offers, to be able to provide the same product at a different price. Let's say someone has a health supplement that you regularly sell at fifty nine dollars. With a special promo, they want to offer it at forty nine dollars. So, they end up creating a clone of the product with the price set at forty nine dollars. Now, let’s add a monthly subscription price option that they want to offer at thirty nine dollars per month and a special Black Friday deal for twenty nine dollars.

These are all very common pricing options & offers for E-commerce & direct response supplement businesses, however, if the tools being used are not suited to serve your business, you’ll end up creating an operational & reporting nightmare in no time. This is what most companies product listings look like:

At first glance, it doesn't seem too bad, but the issue arises when you start to think about inventory & reporting. How many units of the product were sold over the previous month, quarter, or year? They are all the same product, but now you have product IDs, with different characteristics like price, single sale versus recurring subscriptions, and so on.

This quickly turns into a messy situation that can cause additional work to filter and segment spreadsheets to try and make sense of it all…

Luckily for you, there is a better way. Whether you are a business owner, handle the operations, or are in charge of the marketing and advertising, these all need to be aligned & work cohesively to streamline your business. We can very easily craft a plan and execute on it to iron out all these types of problems.

WebForce was designed in a way that the hierarchy of products, variations, subscription plans, and offers work within a simple yet robust way.

Here is what the ideal setup for the previous example would look like done correctly:

All of these options have one thing in common. They all share the same product ID

Now that you are starting to understand how the basics of products and offers work in the WebForce system, make sure to check out part 2 and learn more about how WebForce can change the way you structure your product variations, subscriptions and more!

Check List:

• Log in to Webforce

• An active account

• Subscription plans