Marketplace and subscriptions

The Marketplace is where a customer buys services themselves, rather than an administrator provisioning them by hand. It sits on the ecommerce subsystem, which also provides the subscription, payment and transaction screens.

What the customer sees

1. Marketplace — the catalogue of what they can buy.
2. Cart — what they have selected.
3. Payment — the payment profile the purchase is charged against.
4. Subscription — what they end up with, and what recurs.

Once bought, the service is provisioned into their hosting space in the normal way. A marketplace purchase is a different route to the same outcome as an administrator adding a hosting add-on.

Subscriptions

A subscription is the recurring commitment behind a service. Its screens cover add-ons, term changes, adjustments, refunds, cancellation and reactivation.

Cancelling a subscription eventually removes the service

Cancellation is a billing action with a service consequence. Depending on configuration the service continues to the end of the paid term and then stops — which means the customer’s data goes with it.

Before cancelling on a customer’s behalf, confirm what happens to their content at term end and whether they need it extracted first. “We cancelled the subscription” and “we deleted their mailboxes” can be the same event separated by a few weeks.

Payment profiles and transactions

Payment profiles hold how a customer pays. Transactions record what was charged, with an offline payment path for customers who do not pay by card.

Credit limit governs how much a customer can commit to before payment.

Never enter a customer's card details on their behalf

Payment profiles are for the customer to complete. Taking card details over the phone or by email and entering them yourself puts you in scope for obligations you almost certainly are not set up to meet, and leaves the details somewhere they should not be.

Send the customer to the payment screen instead.

Adjustments and refunds

Adjustments and refunds change what a customer has been charged.

These move real money and are recorded

Both create a transaction record that will be reconciled against payment provider statements. A mistaken refund is not undone by making another adjustment — it leaves two records and a discrepancy for someone to explain.

Confirm the amount and the subscription before applying either.

Customer approvals

Where customers can sign themselves up, each new account waits for approval before it becomes active. Customer Approvals in the Account menu is where those pending sign-ups are reviewed.

The screen appears only when the platform’s self-created users policy is enabled. With that policy off, customers are created by an administrator and there is nothing to approve, so the menu item is absent by design.

An approval provisions a real account

Approving is not an acknowledgement — it creates a working account against a hosting plan, with whatever that plan provisions. Check the details before approving, particularly on a platform where sign-up is open to anyone who finds the page.

Why the Marketplace menu may be absent

Marketplace requires ecommerce to be enabled for the account. Where it is off, neither the marketplace nor the subscription screens appear, and services are provisioned by an administrator instead — which is the normal arrangement for customers who are invoiced directly.

Related

• Hosting plans — what the catalogue sells
• Hosting add-ons — the administrator-provisioned equivalent