Commerce

Introduction

In today’s time, keeping track of sales and consolidating payments is utmost importance for companies and organizations of all sizes. Implementing a specialized billing and pricing management solution can drastically revamp critical business operations on all ends, such as billing data collection, mediation, rating, invoicing, and the number of other significant procedures. Therefore, the CloudBlue Connect platform presents the Commerce module that is specifically tailored for your organization to ensure that all associated processes are optimized, well-managed, and transparent.

The Commerce module enables your organization to provide clear and easy to understand billing and pricing information to your business partners and customers. The Commerce module is designed to improve your financial accounting accuracy, streamline invoicing operations, and automate workflows that are associated with your transaction journals. Consequently, such functionality can greatly increase revenue and supercharge your business growth while eliminating transaction blunders and reducing customer churn.

Before diving into the provided module specifications and learning about new features, it is important to learn about essential processes and operations that are associated with this module.

Overview

The Commerce module provides the functionality that streamlines billing and pricing-related processes as well as other interactions between Vendors, Distributors and Resellers. The following provides an overview of this module and summarizes all available interactions between different organizations on Connect:

The creation and management of data streams is the key feature of the Commerce module. Data streams are used to transfer table-based information that is generated by Vendors. Such data tables are transformed and passed through the supply chain layers to implement billing management and price management, and other scenarios.

Data transformation is another important aspect of the Commerce module as it represents modification of data streams throughout your supply chain. Data transformations include various functions, such as rating, conversions, and other specific scenarios and operations.

Information that is passed to billing streams is called billing batches on the Connect platform. Consequently, the system requires Vendors to create a billing stream, generate billing batches, and share them with Distributors. Upon receiving such batches, Distributors can apply their own logic to define billing information and establish data streams to end-customers and Resellers. The system also allows Resellers to define their billing batches based on billing data provided by Distributors and use it for working with their own customers. Pricing streams and other data streams typically follow the same logic and include similar transitions.

The detailed description of data streams, billing batches, price lists, and all associated operations is provided within the Key Concepts & Terminology article.

Features and Benefits

The Commerce module automates and streamlines a number of critical business processes. The following showcases examples of how its functionality that can be increasingly beneficial for your organization:

• Handle complex commerce operations easily and just with a few clicks. The CloudBlue Connect platform greatly simplifies all operations to set up, schedule, and manage data streams for active subscriptions as well as on-demand services.
• Manage your prices from a single location. It is often tiresome to keep track of your prices and update prices for each product one by one. The Connect platform provides a compelling interface that allows quickly and easily changing and updating prices across multiple channels.
• Drive efficiency by helping your accounting and finance teams. The Commerce module allows downloading accurate and transparent billing reports. Therefore, such reports can be shared within your organization and used for subsequent finance operations.
• The Connect platform provides flexibility and control of time with invoices. Whether your customers want upgrade in the middle of the billing cycle, change billing dates, temporarily hold billing, or change a contract — your organization in full control over when to create another billing batch.
• Grow recurring revenues quicker by innovating with the Commerce module. The system allows billing upfront or during the contract lifecycle as well as charging based on consumption. Thus, your organization can create different pricing plans for each product in your catalog by mixing and matching different pricing and monetization strategies.
• The Commerce module is built to grow. Critical billing and pricing operations can be executed manually or can be customized to fit your specific business requirements today and in the future.

This is by no means the full list of how the Commerce module can help for your organization. As you dive into the provided functionality, you will discover many features that are increasingly beneficial for your business.

Next Steps

For more information on key workflows and terminology, operations with graphical user interface, and provided API, refer to the following articles: