Designing your product catalog

This page is about why and how to think. For the upload steps, see Upload your first catalog.

What you deliver, and how you deliver it, is the core of your value proposition. The catalog captures that in three connected layers:

Product   →  what you sell          smallest sellable unit: a license, a seat etc.
Offering  →  how you package it     what the customer actually buys
Rate      →  how it is charged      price, billing frequency, currency

Each layer refers to the one above it by ID: an offering lists Product IDs, and a rate belongs to one Offering ID and prices that offering's products.

Price to value

Match the pricing unit to where the customer gets value.

Kind of offering	Where value comes from	Recommended pricing basis	Examples
Person-to-person	Another person's time spent achieving an outcome	Hours, or a percentage of the outcome's value	Consulting, implementation fees, support, customization
Product-to-person	A user gets insight, creates output or experiences the product	Number of users (split by user type), or a percentage of the outcome's value. If the product is consumed, units consumed.	Media subscriptions, SaaS seats. Consumption: utilities, food, fuel
Product-to-product	One system acts by engaging another system	Usage, events, or a percentage of the outcome's value	AI-model credits, payment-processing fees

How these choices map to MonetizeNow:

Seat or license pricing → a Subscription product, often Volume or Tiered priced by quantity.
Consumption or event pricing → a Usage product.
Services and set-up fees → a Onetime product.

Bundle for simplicity

Product: the smallest logical unit you would offer or sell, usually a license, a seat or a credit. Products can be connected to entitlements to switch product functionality on.
Offering (bundle): what the customer is buying, meaning every product and feature they actually pay for.
- If a product can be bought on its own, it is also an offering.
- If a product can only be bought as part of something bigger (for example, Support only alongside the platform), it exists only inside a bundled offering. In the upload template you mark each product in an offering as Required Y or N.
Rate: different prices or payment frequencies for exactly the same functionality, bundle or products. The most common case is Monthly versus Annual.

Rule of thumb

If your quote repeats a lot of words or descriptions, the catalog is probably too detailed.
If your quote doesn't make clear what the customer actually bought, the catalog is probably too vague.

Why the upload goes in a fixed order

Offerings need real Product IDs, and rates need real Offering and Product IDs. MonetizeNow builds each template from your tenant at the moment you download it:

The Offerings template's dropdown lists only your Active products.
The Rates template lists only Active offerings that contain at least one product.

So the dependable sequence is: upload products → download the Offerings template → upload offerings → download the Rates template → upload rates. A template downloaded too early won't contain the records you just created.

Why build in Sandbox first

A catalog usually takes a few rounds to get right. Uploading is fast, and Undo removes recent imports in bulk, so a Sandbox tenant is the place to iterate. Promote to Production only once the structure is settled. See Promote a catalog to Production.