Support for Corporate Subscriptions/Sub accounts
Is there any support or do you suggest an approach to how we can do corporate billing for a number of users in our system. Here's a scenario:
We have a Saas that has both individual customers, but also will have 'Corporate' members. When I say Corporate, that means that one person would be in charge of billing, and they would pay for a group of people to use our service. The users inside of this corporation will not need to have their own billing profile because they won't be paying with individual credit cards or payment information.
I was thinking that I would either have to create two separate products or separate pricing plans. For the individual plans, I would just setup a regular monthly pricing amount. For the corporate accounts, I would create a plan that has no monthly fee, but use tracked items for the number of sub-accounts (number of users in my system). I would assume that the logic for adding/updating subscriptions would be on my end, but I would only tie the main corporate user to Cheddar Getter, but none of the sub accounts. I would have to make sure that whenever this account is updated (payments,expired credit cards, etc) the logic to update/cancel my users would have to flow down from that.
Does this make sense? Does this seem like the best way of handling this type of situation with Cheddar Getter? Am I missing something here?
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1 Posted by Geoff Treitel on 09 Jul, 2010 04:44 PM
Jay,
I do not work for CG but I like to follow the public discussions to mimic a "user communinity" to find out best practices.
We have a similar issue where I work.
We are tryng out the following...
1 A corporate super user signs up with CG and a credit card.
2 We allow a set of subusers. The number of subusers is limited by use of the CG tracked items.
3 To authenticate that a subuser corporate account is active and in a good state, we store locally the state of the corporate plan and we authenticate the subuser against this information.
4. We will sync the state of the local account to CG by a cronjob for now.
5. Eventually we would like to use CG Event Push Notification to do our syncing.
6. We specifically chose not to make a round trip each time a subuser logs in to our app to check the sate of the account on CG...we felt at this time we would be ok if we do this by cronjob for now.
disclaimer- we are building our applciaton and integrating ecommerce right now...so how this works in practice is hard to say as we have no real paying corporate customers yet...
thanks
Support Staff 2 Posted by Marc Guyer on 09 Jul, 2010 06:07 PM
You've pretty much got it. gtreitel's techniques for the corporate account handling are sound. You might choose to use two different product accounts just to keep the different types separate. The tracked items are across all pricing plans within a product, so for standard user plans, the quantities and charges for the subuser tracked items would all be zero. CG could potentially "allow" switching a user from a basic user account to a corporate account. Not sure if something like that would be a problem for you. I guess all I'm saying is that using two product accounts isn't required for the setup you describe.
You might also consider using the meta data feature to store the sub-user id's with the parent account:
http://support.cheddargetter.com/faqs/api-8/customer-meta-data
Marc Guyer closed this discussion on 09 Jul, 2010 06:07 PM.