The Vendasta Marketplace includes over 200 curated solutions for partners like you to resell, all matched to the world’s most common SMB needs. However, many partners don’t just come to Vendasta to expand their product offerings. That’s why Vendasta makes it easy to market, sell, bill, and fulfill your own products and services, all under your own brand, by providing robust product creation and integration capabilities in Vendor Center.
By adding your own products and services to the Vendasta platform using Vendor Center, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the features Vendasta already offers, including:
- Setting specific categories for the products in your Store.
- Invoicing capabilities for products you already sell.
- Using HTML on your product’s marketing page. This appears to your clients through Business App.
- Custom order forms.
- Creating an unlimited number of add-ons for each of your custom products.
- Advanced integration options including webhooks and SSO.
Create a basic product in Partner Center
Products can be created quickly from Partner Center > Marketplace > Products by clicking Create Product. This workflow provides four short steps for creating your product without using Vendor Center:
- Basic Info: the name and icon image of your product. These will be visible to Partner Center users, salespeople, and your customers in Business App.
- Pricing: the billing frequency, cost, and retail price of your product.
- Is your product billed once or as a subscription? - When a product is billed as a subscription, a customer needs to make a monthly payment to continue using it. If your product requires a recurring payment to use, select Subscription and choose the frequency (monthly or yearly) with which the customer is billed. Select Once if you only charge clients a one-time price for your product
- Cost - This is how much your product costs to you. This will not be shown to your clients. The cost allows you to track the cost of providing or delivering this product to a customer, as compared to the retail price you charge for your product.
- Retail - The price that you charge customers for your product. If your product is billed as a subscription, this price is charged monthly or yearly.
- Marketing: the description and key selling points of your product, which will appear on its marketing page in your store.
- Marketing description - A concise and informative paragraph or two that communicates what your product is, why it’s unique, and why customers will love it.
- Key selling points - Point-form value propositions that describe how your product solves your clients’ problems.
- Confirmation: choose whether to save your product as a draft and continue editing in Vendor Center or to publish your product and start selling.
- Continue editing in Vendor Center - Your product will be saved as a draft and you can continue editing in Vendor Center where you can create custom order forms, set up advanced integrations, and further customize your marketing page.
- Publish - Your product will be published and added to your store, ready to sell.
Create a product in Vendor Center
Creating a product in Vendor Center will provide you with the complete list of customization options for your product. You can always edit this information later, and customers won't see this product in your store until you've published it.
From Vendor Center, click Add Product to get started. The following tabs will become available for you to edit.
Product info
Basics
- Name: the name of your product
- Icon: your product's icon, which appears alongside the name.
- Short description: the "tagline" that appears in previews of your product in your Store and marketing material
Pricing & trials
Here you can set the pricing model that your product follows, including defining the billing period, subscription terms, retail price, and trial availability.
Note that the price fields in Vendor Center are currently always set in USD. For partners operating in currencies other than USD, Retail Prices can be set for enabled products in the currency you select for your store in Partner Center > Marketplace > Manage Store.
Product activation
These settings affect what happens when your product is activated, canceled, or deactivated for an account, including messaging, notifications, and order forms.
Activation message
The message you enter here will be displayed to customers or Partner Center users when they submit an order for your product. You can use this message to outline service timelines, provide supplementary information or instructions about the order process, or simply thank your customer for their order.
Note that if your product has been distributed for resale in the Vendasta Marketplace, resellers of your product and their customers will see this message when they submit an order as well.
Notifications
A notification will be sent to the email addresses you enter here when your product is activated, canceled, or deactivated. To add more than one email address, click the + Add recipient button.
Required products
Choose one or more products that customers must purchase before they can purchase or use your product.
When customers attempt to purchase or order your product, or when a Partner Center user attempts to activate your product on behalf of their customer, it will check that the required products are already active or are part of the order. If not, the user will be prompted to add the required products to the order as well.
You can require other products that you've created, or you can choose another vendor's product as a requirement for your own product. For example, if you offer a managed social posting service in Social Marketing, you can choose Social Marketing as a required product to ensure that your customers always have the correct product active on their account when they purchase your service.
Order form
One of the key benefits of integrating your product through the Vendor Center is the ability to create custom order forms to request specific information from your customers when they purchase your product.
Toggle the Use a custom order form setting On and click Build form to begin creating your order form.
Country availability
Select the regions where your product is available for purchase and use. Customers whose business addresses are outside the regions you select won’t be able to purchase or use your product.
If your product can be purchased and used regardless of your customer’s location, leave this field blank.
Marketing
Each product created in Vendor Center has associated End User and Partner marketing pages. These pages appear in the Store and Marketplace, respectively, and display key information about the product.
To edit a marketing page for a product in Vendor Center, click a section of the page. Click the Preview toggle to view the page as it will appear to users in the Store or Marketplace. To resume editing, simply toggle Preview off again.
Integration
Integration settings can be used to enhance your product’s functionality within the Vendasta platform, including activating webhooks, redirection to specific URLs, and integration with Vendasta's Marketplace API. For more information, consult our Vendasta Marketplace documentation.
Add-ons
Add-ons are used to support purchasing optional features or services related to your product. For example, if you create a product to represent a website-building service you offer, an add-on could be created to represent an additional service you offer as part of that website—adding an additional page on the website, adding e-commerce functionality to the website you build, 24-hour support for technical issues, and so on.
Use add-ons to add value and flexibility to the products that you offer your customers. An add-on can’t be purchased by a customer who hasn’t purchased the add-on’s parent product, so ensure that the add-ons you create will add value to the product they belong to.
Note that add-ons can’t be created for products that you haven’t created yourself.
Click on the Add-on Info or Marketing tab to edit your add-on’s settings. The settings available for an add-on in its Add-on Info tab are similar to those available for a product in the Product Info tab. Likewise, you can edit your add-on’s marketing pages in the Marketing tab the same way you would edit it for a product.
Publish your product
Once you have finished editing your product and are ready to start selling it, click Publish product. When a product is published, it becomes available to manage in the Partner Center, where you can do any of the following:
- Manage your product’s retail price in your store
- Add your product to your store
- Add your product to a package in your store
- Activate your product for a customer
- Invoice for your product using Vendasta Payments