Configure Product Catalog

a. Design a winning product, pricing, and bundling strategy.

This will be the most strategic aspect of onboarding to MonetizeNow. What you deliver, and how you deliver it, is the essence of your value proposition to your end-customers. Your Product Catalog represents the products, bundles, and pricing for your end-customers (based on desired restrictions and availability).

This is a step to be done in collaboration with Product, Marketing, and the experts at MonetizeNow.

We have put together two blog posts, Part 1 & Part 2 to help guide your thinking in shaping a product and pricing strategy. That said, some guiding principles to help you on this journey:

• Price to value. What this broadly means for certain classes of products,

  • Person-to-Person Offering - where the value is derived from another person's time dedicated to achieve an outcome - pricing based on hours or as a percentage of end outcome's value is recommend.
    • Common examples include Consultative Services, Implementation Fees, Support, Product Customization.
  • Product-to-Person Offering - where the value is derived from a user extracting insight, creating outputs, or experiencing the product - pricing based on a number of users (segmented by type of users) or as a percentage of end outcome's value is recommend. Note: If there is a Product-to-Person interaction where the product is consumed, then pricing based on units consumed is recommended.
    • Common examples include Media Subscriptions, SaaS Seats.
    • Common consumption examples include Utilities, Food, Gasoline.
  • Product-to-Product Offering - where the value is derived from a system performing an action by engaging with another system - pricing based on usage, events, or as a percentage of end outcome's value is recommend.
    • Common examples include Credits for AI Model Usage, Payment Processing Fees.

• Bundle for simplicity,

  • Your Product is the smallest logical unit you would offer / sell to a customer.
    • Often these are a license, a seat, a credit.
    • These could be connected to entitlements to dynamically activate product functionality
  • Your Offering (or Bundle) is what a customer is buying and is the collection of all the products / features they can actually paying for.
    • If someone can buy a product directly it is also an Offering
    • If someone can only buy a product when a part of something bigger (e.g. Support with a Product) then it is only available as a Bundled Offering
  • Your Rates should only represent different prices or payment frequencies for the exact same functionality / bundle / products.
    • Most common would be Monthly vs. Annual Pricing.

  As a rule of thumb:

  • If your quote is repeating a lot of words or descriptions, your product catalog is likely too detailed.
  • If your quote is unclear as to what the customer actually purchased, your product catalog is likely too vague.

b. Upload products, bundles, and pricing into MonetizeNow Product Catalog

Once your product catalog is set strategically, follow our step-by-step guide to code-up your catalog into MonetizeNow.

Uploading the Product Catalog via Excel/CSV

MonetizeNow offers an Excel/CSV-based flow to configure your product catalog quickly and reliably, ideal during onboarding, sandbox testing, or for customers managing large or complex catalogs.

The catalog is structured across three connected layers

1. Products → What you sell
2. Offerings → How you package it
3. Pricing → How it’s charged

Each layer is interconnected using internal IDs (referenced in the Values sheet in the Excel templates), so understanding the correct order and relationships is key.

Upload Sequence Overview

Step-1: Add Products

Products are the top-level items in your catalog, they describe what you’re offering at a high level.

Required Columns (values tab → Products)

Key Notes:

• Once uploaded, each product is automatically assigned a Product ID
• This id is what Offerings will use to associate themselves

Step-2: Create Offerings

Offerings are the specific configurations of how a product is sold. E.g., “Annual Plan” vs. “Monthly Plan” of the same product.

Required Columns (values tab → Offerings)

Key Notes:

• The product_id must match an existing product from your earlier upload
• name is customer-facing and used during quoting
• Use the Values tab of the product upload to grab the correct product IDs
• 5 max Products - WIP

Step-3: Price Offerings

This step defines how each offering is billed, including recurring pricing, one-time charges, and usage-based rates.

Required Columns (values tab → rates)

Key Notes:

• The offering_id links the rate to a specific offering
• Use the Values tab of the Offerings template to find the right IDs
• Multiple pricing rows can exist for a single offering (e.g., flat recurring + usage-based add-on)
• Cannot mix tiered with other pricing models - WIP

Uploading in the UI

You’ll find the upload areas under Configure Catalog in your tenant:

1. Add Products
2. Create Offerings
3. Price Offerings

Each section allows:

• Drag-and-drop or manual upload (CSV or XLSX)
• Template download
• Undo imports

Sandbox vs Production Flow

• Build and test your catalog structure in Sandbox
• Once finalized, reach out to the MN team for migration support (currently via internal tooling)
• In future, this migration will be available as a secure, admin-level self-service feature

FAQs- Troubleshooting Upload Errors