External Products

External products give you the ability to allow your customers to discover a wide range of products and services, not just your own plans, bundles, entitlements, and so on, all by starting within your ecosystem. And the more things that your customers learn that they can find in your store or starting from your store, the more often they will go into your store, which allows you to present to them products and offers that they may not have known about. The External Product product type expands your catalog offerings to items such as:

Merchandise sold by other retailers, such as phone insurance, and phone accessories
Information about services you offer that customers can interact with directly, such as maps that show customer service offices or kiosk locations
Value-added services, such as premium subscriptions to third-party apps, ringtones, and emoji bundles
Internal links to encourage customer behavior, such as links to the Top-Up or Billing page with a banner that offers 10% off the customer's next purchase if they add a credit card to their account

Unlike plans, bundles, entitlements, and other similar products created with Service Design Center, external product products and services are not fulfilled by ItsOn. This means customers find external products in your catalog, but they do not go through the Service Design Center check out and purchase flow. An external product takes customers to the product's website, outside your ecosystem, which is where the purchase is completed and invoiced. Several settings specific to external products help make the purchase process streamlined:

URL: The URL field can carry a lot of information, not just the online location of a product listing. For example, certain data, such as map data, can be encoded into a URL.
SSO enabled: The SSO (single sign-on) enabled field allows more direct access to product information and purchasing rights for product and service companies with which customers can share credentials. For example, if you allow your customers to use their social media credentials for their account, if you also allow your customers use those credentials for other services outside ItsOn that also use SSO, and if you have set up SSO integration with those outside services, you can pass those credentials when sending a customer to the outside product or service purchase location.
Skip Product Details Page: The Skip Product Details Page setting allows your users to skip a step when it is unnecessary. Typically, when customers are browsing your catalog and tap on a listing of one of your products, such as one of your plans, they are taken to a product details page, which contains additional information about that product and a button that adds your product to their cart. For many external product experiences, especially when you're featuring an external product in a banner that already has additional information or when the URL destination is something like a kiosk map, a separate details page with a buy button is not necessary, or may not even make sense. With these experiences, the button would take them to an external location defined by a URL, and so it might be a better experience to go to that location with a tap on the listing, rather than a tap on the listing and then another tap on the button.

This setting also allows you to create a "store-within-a-store" when you have other stores on the web. For example, if you sell ringtones and emojis in different web stores, you could create an external product that links to ringtones and another one that links to emojis and allow one tap to take customers right to the web store purchase points.

Because purchases of external products are not fulfilled by ItsOn, information about the purchase is not available within Service Design Center. Specifically, the Customer Support pages that provide details of virtual product purchases will not contain information about products purchase through external links.

External products cannot be added to basic bundles, compound bundles, or exchange categories. If you attempt to promote a change that includes a basic bundle, compound bundle, or exchange category that contains an external product, the promotion will fail and you will see an error.

The external product product type is the way to make just about any product, service or information available from within your store. Here are a few examples.

Premium App Service

If you offer app plans in your store, some third-party apps probably offer additional functionality or membership for an additional cost. For example, you could offer streaming app plans, for services such as Spotify, Pandora, Slacker, Hulu, YouTube, and others. These app plans give your customers data service on your network specifically to access these services without using up general data plan allowances. Services such as these have tiers of service, including basic, free tiers and premium, paid tiers. You can create external products that are direct links to these services' paid tiers pages, where your customers can easily and quickly purchase premium services.

In addition, this could provide an added bonus for you. If a customer subscribes to a premium service and you sell an app-specific plan for that service, the customer might be more likely to continue paying for the app plan subscription.

Discount for Adding Credit Card to Account

The linking capability of external products extends to the self-care app with internal links. For example, you can use an external product as a featured product, so it displays as a banner. In the banner graphic, you say "Add a credit card to your account to get 10% off your next purchase." In the URL field, you enter the internal link to the billing page. You add the external product to the Featured Products tab of the category that makes the banner display on the customer's default page. Customers who tap on the banner would then be taken to the Top-Up or Billing page in the self-care app. In addition, you can use the segmentation rules in a restriction to show this banner only to customers who have not yet added a credit card to their account.

Locations

Mapping applications can store location information in URLs so that information can be saved and shared.

For example, open Google Maps and search for Seven Elevens (the U.S.-based convenience store). Not only will the resulting map show nearby locations, a URL will be generated. The URL might look like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/search/seven+elevens/@37.5297716,-122.2860779,13z/data=!3m1!4b1?hl=en.

You can see that information has been encoded in this URL, including the search string, the language, and the location. Depending on your preferred mapping application, you may be able to create URLs similarly with information that you want your customers to have, such as all the locations of your kiosks.

You can: