Fees

Fees are a product type that do not have certain product characteristics, which makes fee behavior a bit different from other product types and makes the use of fees a bit different as well. Fees are not based on any type of policy nor do they have any consumable elements, so settings such as product allocation or shareablility don't apply to fees.

When you think of a "fee," you likely think of things such as line fees, typically billed monthly on a per-line basis, and activation fees, typically charged one time when activating new service. But the fee product can be used for much more, such as for promotional memberships or for shipping of physical products. "Fee" is just the name of this product type.

Put simply, fees are just money paid to you by customers. What customers get for paying fees is up to you. Service Design Center allows to you create fees, receive the money for fees, and track the payment of fees.

The Service Design Center functions that you will typically use to cause fees to be charged to customers include categories and benefits. Sign-up categories allow to you to charge fees when accounts are created and when subscribers join accounts. The rules in benefits allow you to define conditions, including specific subsets of your customer base, that result in fees being charged (or not charged). You can also use the benefit rules to determine if a fee is being charged (or not charged), and give some other product based on the result.

For example, you could charge an annual membership that gives customers additional benefit. Perhaps, say, 10 percent off of all specialized plans and 15 percent off of all gifted plans. The membership product would be in its own category. Then you would create a benefit with the qualification criteria of Account - Lacks subscribable product in Category - Name to determine if a customer has the annual membership, and if so, apply the percent off of purchases.

Fees cannot be added to compound bundles (because the sharing attributes of compound bundles does not align with how fees behave) or exchange categories. If you attempt to promote a change that includes a compound bundle or an exchange category that contains a fee, the promotion will fail and you will see an error.

There are two types of fees: account fees and subscriber fees. See Fee Settings for details about the difference.

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