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Get started with Limio Commerce with Zuora and Salesforce

Amaury de Closset
Updated

Welcome to Limio! We're excited to get you started on your journey to better subscription commerce. Limio is an enterprise commerce application and there’s a couple of steps to take before you can start selling.

In this onboarding guide, we’ll cover how to set up key third-party applications for billing, payments, authentication. You'll need to have access to a couple of applications to get yourself started, including:

  • Zuora, with admin knowledge of how the product catalog, payments, and tax are configured.
  • Salesforce, with admin knowledge of the setup area

We’ll also cover the basics setup of a sandbox and explain some of the more advanced setups options. More specifically, this guide will walk you through:

Each link will reference a more detailed document, so you can always get more details where you need.

Your Limio app

By default, your application will use the following domains:

  • Primary Domain:
    https://{tenant}.prod-us.limio.com/

  • Online Purchase and Self-Service Domain:
    https://{tenant}-shop.prod-us.limio.com/

You can update the domain of your online experience to a custom domain later. However, keeping these default URLs handy will be helpful during the initial setup.

Add users

Ecommerce is a team effort, and marketers, product managers, developers and operation staff will often need access to Limio.

Go to Users to add more team members. You’ll also be able to configure access and permissions. Tenant Administrator will give you the most flexibility in a sandbox.

Configure Integrations

Limio works with other applications and can be connected with no code. Here are the applications you’ll need to connect to get started:

  • Zuora: Go to Settings > Zuora and add your client ID and Secret. Read our guide for more details.
    • Configure your payments in Zuora by creating Hosted Payment Method Pages using Limio's shop domain (https://{tenant}-shop.prod-us.limio.com/). For sandbox environments, Zuora's Test Gateway is recommended.
  • (Optional) Salesforce: Go into your Salesforce instance and read our guide.
  • (Optional) Authentication: You can select OpenID, SAML, or more to get started. However, we recommend you do this step later and use Limio’s Anonymous Authentication to get started. Go to Settings > Authentication Providers, click Anonymous Authentication, and give it a name (e.g. Anonymous Auth)

Create your Limio Catalog

Sync from Zuora

In this guide, we’ll assume you’ve created already data in Zuora, but if you haven’t, read Zuora’s quick start guide on the product catalog.

The fastest way to load the Limio Catalog is to use the Catalog Sync with Zuora. This will store a local copy of your Zuora catalog in Limio, as well as create Limio Products and Limio Offers automatically for you.

Limio Products

The sync will automatically populate your Limio data. Now you'll want to review the Limio Products created. If they are physical product, you should toggle on the delivery option.

Optionally, you can also attach Limio Entitlements that you wish to track.

Limio Offers

Then, review the Limio Offers to make sure all the configuration is appropriate. Limio Offers is the commercial proposition sold to your customers. So it includes:

  • Display fields, which is what the end customer see.
  • Billing configuration, which defines how Limio will integrate with Zuora
  • Product(s), which also includes the ability to define a default rate or pricing plan from the billing system
  • Commerce behaviour, which will drive the experience for the end customer
  • Product tab, which references the Limio Product (related to a Zuora Product) and the Zuora Rate Plan.

To get started, go to an Offer:

  • Make sure to have a Display Name and a display price.
  • Make sure you have a Limio Product and a corresponding Rate Plan attached in the Offer > Product tab.
  • Check you have a Pricing defined.
    • To get started, we recommend to Use External Pricing? to true.
    • Set the Currency (e.g. USD)
    • You can also set the initial price in Limio.  Learn more in initial pricing vs. external pricing.
  • Define the Terms (e.g. 1 Month termed), Auto-Renew (True), and Payment Method (e.g. Zuora Card Payments)
  • Define the Allowable Countries, you can Select All if you don't need to restrict purchases.
  • Set Allow Multi-Buy to true if you sell a quantity-based products
  • Last step, define labels, which is the way to attach an offer to a pricing page. A label could be ‘USA Offers’ or ‘Black Friday’. Labels are important in Limio: they allow you to group offers and later can drive logic like the upgrade path.

A full list of what each field does is available here.

 

Create your Acquisition pages

Step-by-Step

Now for the exciting part: creating your ecommerce experience. We’ll cover the basics of acquisition flow:

  • Pricing page:
    • Create your first page
    • Set a tag such as /pricing for the URL at which the page will be available
    • Attach the offer label you created in the step Above.
    • Populate the page with Limio Components. At a minimum, typical components to use will be Header with Navigation, Offers, and Footer.
      • You should see your offers on the page.
      • The CTA will automatically go to the checkout link defined on the offers. Standard will go to the URL /checkout.
  • Checkout:
    • Create a checkout page using the tag /checkout.
    • Mark the page as authenticated. You can reference the Anonymous Auth created above.
    • Drag the checkout Form component and enter the sub component manager to create the fields you want to have.
      • For a digital product, those will typically be First Name, Last Name, Email, Address (Billing), Payments and a checkbox field for T&Cs.
    • Set an order complete link such as /order-complete.
  • Order complete: Similar to the previous page, set a tag such as /order-complete. Then drag the order confirmation component.

That’s it, those are the core pages for a purchase funnel! Click on the Builds button at the top of the page and publish the page to make it available online.

From here, you will typically start customising the design via CSS or deploy custom components for more control. You may want to also route traffic intelligently, for example customers from certain countries can see a specific page. And you’ll probably want to create multiple pricing pages, or route customers to purchase via promo codes and purchase links.

Time to test a purchase

Publish, hit your /pricing page, then go through the funnel.

In a sandbox, use a test email address (e.g. me+test@limio.com) and a test card (4242 4242 4242 4242 usually works across gateways) to authenticate and process your first order.

This should automatically populate Limio and Zuora. If there’s is an issue, head to events to see what has gone wrong and modify the relevant configuration.

 

Create your Self-Service pages

Step-by-Step

Ok acquisition done, now what about self-service? Here are some pages to create:

All pages should be authenticated, as they won’t load without identifying the customers. You should use re-use Anonymous Auth to get started.

Time to test self-service

Once your pages are live, you will have the basics of self-service. Publish them and see the changes taking effect in Limio and connected apps such as Zuora. More details on how Limio updates other systems here.

You’ll need to process a purchase as described in the previous step, then go to /myaccount page. Try the various flows you have setup. 

 

Go further with advanced configuration

Alright basics done, now let’s cover some of the more advanced setup:

Marketing capabilities 

  • 🎨 Design: Want more control over the design and the rules to execute during an upgrade or downgrade? Custom components coupled with Limio User and Subscription SDK gives you full creative control.
  • 🗂️ Products: Limio isn’t just for simple subscriptions and you can also sell add-ons, one-off, bundles, gift and group subscriptions. Setup will vary a bit so take a look at what is needed for your use case.
  • 🧠 Personalisation: What if you have multiple products, brands or want to personalise the switch or cancellation experience? You’ll be able to use Limio Journeys, which allows you to redirect subscribers to specific experiences dynamically based on the initial offer they purchased or their segment. 
  • 📊 Analytics: Limio can feed user events via a data layer to popular tag manager such as Google Tag Manager and Tealium, to feed into various analytics tool. Learn more here
  • 🔎 SEO: Limio gives you control over what is surfaced to search engines. Learn more here.

Developer capabilities

  • 📞 Salesforce: Limio can integrate with vanilla Salesforce via Platform Events and also has a dedicated apps for agent commerce in Salesforce. 
  • 🔄 Third-party initiated changes: You can update Limio Subscriptions via a simple endpoint, and we’ll take care of the rest. Learn more here.
  • ⤵️ Existing subscriptions: You may already be live on Zuora and wish to migrate your existing subscriptions in Limio. Learn more here.
  • 🚨 Security: Ecommerce attracts fraudsters and Limio has a series of security features to deter them. Learn more how what to set up here
  • 🛃 Tax: Limio will automatically show tax when available, but finer control are available. Learn more here
  • ↪️ Webhooks: have custom applications you want to act on an order or change, for example for fulfilment or provisioning? Our webhooks are there to help.
  • 🌐 Custom domain: your shop and self-service can be hosted on your own custom domain. Learn more how to do that here.
  • 🛒 Abandon basket: Limio can provide a list of unfinished basket that can then be retargeted via notifications, email or ads. Learn more here.

You may also have industry-specific needs, such as selling add-ons alongside core tiered subscription in SaaS or wanting to display the Limio Shop in a paywall. You can talk to your Account Executive to explore your commerce scenarios.

 

Operationalise your ecommerce

Once you’ve got the shop and self-service setup, Limio will automatically populate the following core objects:

  • Customers
  • Orders
  • Subscriptions
  • Events and process events

All customer-initiated action will have an event, and each event has a process events which includes detailed callout to third-party systems, error messages and detailed logs. Head there to troubleshoot any issues.

 

We’re here to help

We’ve written this guide so you could get started and understand how to produce your shop and self-service independently.

But we’re here to help! Reach out to us at hello@limio.com if you are new to the platform or support@limio.com if you are a current customer.

 

 

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