External Product Settings

This topic details all the settings for external products. This is the information you will need when you add or edit external products.

Service Design Center uses a change management process to track and approve all changes to any product. All of these changes, including additions, edits, and deletions, must go through the promote-approve-deploy process before they become available.

Any changes you make (change a name, change a price, add or delete a product from a bundle, etc.) to any product do not affect any users that already have the product.

General Tab

The General tab contains most of the settings you will configure to determine how an external product looks, acts, is priced, and more. 

Appearance Settings

These settings define how information about an external product will appear to customers.

Setting Description
Name Required. The name serves 2 primary purposes: it's what you see in product lists and it's what customers see as a descriptor when they are making purchase decisions. The name is limited to 115 characters.
Short Description Brief plain-text information about the external product that sometimes appears with the plan name. 
Description Detailed and descriptive rich-text information about the external product that appears on product detail pages. You can format the content you enter in several different ways using the functions in the toolbar.
Fulfillment Type

This is a system-required field that is not used for external products. Leave it at its default option.

Currently, ItsOn Digital Delivery is the only option that is supported in the system. Selecting any other option may produce unpredictable results.

Billing Settings

Setting Description
Retail Price Not used for external products.
Sale Price Not used for external products.
Tax Classification Not used for external products.

Destination Settings

Setting Description
URL

Required. The web address of the product.

This is the external website/web store where users will be directed when they tap the destination button. You should try to make the URL as "clean" as possible, with no redirects or other extraneous data.

For example, links in search results and social media often have data embedded in the link after the direct location. A Twitter link might end in something like cid=soc_mentor_twtr&linkId=18222474, data which is often after a question mark (?) character in the URL and is embedded as key-value pairs. In the example that contained this data, you can see 2 key-value pairs, cid=soc_mentor_twtr and linkId=18222474, separated by the ampersand (&) character. You should be able to remove the key-value data pairs from your browser's address bar, as well as the preceding question mark, and then reload the page. If you still see the same page, then you can copy that link and use it in this field.
SSO Enabled

Required. SSO stands for Single Sign-On, and it allows your customers to use credentials across platforms. Specifically, if you are using a URL to a page where your customer's account credentials will be used to sign in, this setting allows that transparent sign in when customers choose to make a purchase of an external product, streamlining the process.

Select:

  • Yes: If the external product is at a URL where SSO credentials will be used.
  • No (default): If the external product is not at a URL where SSO credentials will be used.

If you do not choose correctly for the URL you use, your customer may have a less than optimal experience.

If you choose Yes when you're not using SSO, the intermediary service that processes the credentials will have no credentials to send to the external product website. The result may be that the customer will just be sent to the external website and the customer will have to sign in separately, but the customer may also experience an error from the external website, which depends on that websites security configuration.

If you choose No when you do have SSO capability available and wanted to use it, the intermediary service that processes SSO credentials won't be used and the customer will just be sent to the external website and have to sign in separately.
Destination Button Label Required. The text of the button that will take customers to the product page.
Skip Product Details Page

Required. Defines whether a tap on the catalog listing or banner that features an external product goes to the product details page, which includes the description information and contains a button that takes customers to the destination where the external product can be purchased, or bypasses the product details page and goes directly to the destination.

Select:

  • Yes - To bypass the product details page.
  • No (default) - To take customers to the product details page, and then require an additional tap to go to the purchase destination.

An example of when this might be useful is if the external "product," especially one that's being featured in a banner, is actually a link to information useful to your customers, such as a map that shows store locations or kiosks.