Introduction to Product object

Overview

A product is an item or service that your company sells. In the subscription economy, a product is generally a service that your customers subscribe to rather than a physical item that they purchase one time. For example, customers subscribe to a car rental service that provides them a car when and where they need a car rather than buying a car outright.

A Product object contains all of the items in a specific product, especially product rate plans. Each Product object can have multiple product rate plans. When a customer purchases a product, they can pick from one of the available rate plans.

Related key concepts 

Product Catalog

Product Catalog is where you define your products and pricing. Each company has one product catalog that contains all the products available for sale. You must also define the billing behavior you want for the products or services.

Within Zuora’s Product Catalog, there are 3 tiers for billing:

• Product: The item or service available for purchase. Products in Zuora are often services that your customers subscribe to. For example, the cell phone service offered by operators.
• Product Rate Plan: A collection of charges that your customers may incur when buying your product and decide how a product is priced and invoiced. Taking the cell phone service as an example, the "Unlimited minutes for 2GB data" is a product rate plan.
• Product Rate Plan Charge:  The charges or fees for each rate plan. A product rate plan can contain one or more charges. In the example of the "Unlimited minutes for 2GB data" rate plan, "$50 a month, with $10 for each GB overage" is a product rate plan charge.

For more related concepts, refer to Product Catalog Concepts to get a better understanding. 

CRUD operations and Actions

Zuora provides two types of API operations to support direct interaction with individual objects: Actions, and CRUD operations like CRUD: Create product. They allow you to directly create, retrieve (query), update, or delete standalone objects. Most Zuora Billing objects are supported, except for Invoice Settlement and Orders objects.

Object relationship

By creating a product, you are creating an instance of the Product object. The following diagram describes the required fields for creating a Product object, and its relationship with the joined objects.

Create a product

You can create a product through either the Zuora UI or API.

• To create a product through Zuora UI, see Create a Product in Product Catalog.
• To create a product through API, use CRUD: Create product.

After a product is created, you can proceed to create product rate plans for this product.