Creating Service Offerings Best Practices

This article describes how you can create products that can or have to include service assistance. Imagine the scenarios:

Scenario 1: you sell equipment that requires specific installation, and offer optional installation services for this equipment. The installation services can either be free or chargeable.

Scenario 2: you sell equipment that requires specific installation, and installation by your service technician is required for the warranty to apply. This means, when buyers add specific products to cart, you want the installation service to be automatically included in the cart as well.

Let’s consider how you can handle both of the scenarios for your store.

Prerequisites

The first thing you need to do to start selling a product with either free or chargeable service is to create the product.

To create the product, do the following:

1. Go to Products > Products section and click Create Product on the top-right corner of the page.
2. Populate the necessary fields in the General, Price & Tax, Variants, SEO, Image tabs. See Creating an Abstract Product for details on the tabs and their values.
3. Click Save. Your product is now created and will appear in the list of products in the Products > Products section.
4. Activate the product:
   1. In the list of products in the Products > Products section, find your product and click Edit in the Actions column for it.
   2. In the Variants tab, click Edit for the product(s) you want to make active.
   3. On the Edit Concrete Product page, click Activate. The abstract product will now also become active.
5. Make sure your product is visible searchable in the Storefront by going through the checklist in the HowTo - Make a Product Searchable and Shown on the Storefront article.

Now that you have the product, you can proceed with offering services to it.

Creating a Product with a Service Offering

There are two ways of how you can create a product with a services offering:

• Offer the service as a product option.
• Create a configurable bundle that would include the product and the service.
• Custom solution for your project.

See below for information and step-by-step guides on each of the approaches.

Service as a Product Option

You can make the service, in our example, the installation service, a product option of the product you sell. In this case, the installation service will not be a separate product, but an optional part of the product. This means that buyers can decide on their own if they need the service.

To implement this approach, you need to create the Service product option and tie it to the respective product.

To create the product option, do the following:

1. Go to the Products > Product Options section and click Create product option in the top right corner.
2. Populate all necessary fields in General tab. See Creating a Product Option for details on the fields and their values.
3. In the Products tab, find the product you want to tie the option to, and check the checkbox in the very right column of the table with the product.
4. Click Save. The product option is now created and appears in the Product option list on the Products > Product Options page.
5. Activate the option by clicking Activate in the Actions column of the Product option list.

That’s it. The option appears for the product on the Storefront:

Custom Project Solution

If you need an approach that would best suit your specific business needs, we recommend your development team to implement a custom solution for your project. The custom solution can be handled as follows:

1. Identify the respective products with labels

First of all, you need to somehow identify the products for which the custom solution will be applied. We recommend doing this via product labels. For this, create specific labels for the products that require service from your side. The labels can be, for example, free service, installation service, 1-day service, etc. See Creating a Product Label for details on how to create labels and assign products to them.

2. Override the Add to Cart functionality

At this step, you need the development team to change the default Add to Cart functionality to meet your project’s needs.

The Add to Cart functionality implies a call to both Yves and Zed, which means the development team can execute a back-end logic for it. This logic could be triggered when products with specific labels are added to the cart. For example, it could automatically add the service product to the cart. It could also imply a check, that if another product with the same label is added to cart, the service product is not added, or another service product (for example, a service of another type with another price) is added to cart instead. You could also have a logic that if they buy more than a specific number of the products, the service product is for free.

Even though this approach requires the most effort, it also the most efficient as it can be tailored to your specific needs.