Since we introduced the Recurly Item Catalog feature earlier this year, merchants have enjoyed the ability to manage, track, and analyze all the items they have for sale in a single place. 

We quickly realized that we could provide an even easier and more efficient way to sell the products or services in your catalog by increasing the flexibility of our sales channels. Today, we’re extending the functionality of Item Catalog by enabling merchants to configure item add-ons directly on subscriptions, rather than on plans. This new enhancement streamlines the process of offering highly customized subscriptions and simplifies the configuration of plans and add-ons. 

If you prefer to have Recurly manage and enforce the specific items that can be sold on a plan, you can configure those available items as plan add-ons. But now, if you do not limit the items that can be sold on a plan, or if you manage those restrictions on your own platform, you can bypass this configuration at the plan level instead. You can build dynamic subscription offerings for each of your customers without having to define a plan for every unique offering or product combination. You’ll configure the specific items included in a customer’s individual subscription only when that subscription is created.

Let’s walk through a couple of examples.

Say you sell a suite of pet care products and services, and customers can choose to receive any of them via a recurring subscription. Now, instead of having to specify the availability of each offering as an add-on for each plan, as long as these products and services are listed in your Item Catalog, you can make them all available for subscription in one click.

Another example, from a SaaS perspective, would be the purchase of add-ons based on the plan tier or number of seats the customer has selected. If your UI only offers add-ons that are acceptable for the chosen plan, then you are already enforcing the items that can be purchased on each plan. Now, you no longer need to duplicate those controls, and the maintenance of those controls, within Recurly.

By adding items from your Recurly Item Catalog directly to your customers’ subscriptions, you can:

  • Save time creating plans by no longer needing to create a plan for each offering or configure every item that is available to purchase on the plan

  • Save time creating and managing subscriptions by consolidating all offerings with the same billing cadence into a single subscription

  • Easily release new offerings because they will automatically be available for purchase on applicable plans

  • Optimize pricing and packaging by easily testing different ways of selling add-ons

  • Streamline integrations with external ecommerce platforms by aligning object architectures

If you think this would be a great fit for your business model, please contact Recurly Support so they can enable this feature on your site! Additional information is available in our Item Catalog documentation.