How to configure Limio Offers with Initial Price and Zuora Rate Plans

In this user guide, you will learn how to setup a Rate Plan in Zuora that is compatible with a Limio Offer and leveraging Limio's capabilities to hold the promotional price information. As a reminder,

• A Zuora Rate Plan is the price defined in the Zuora Billing Product Catalog, which can include the one or multiple charges incurred by the customer.
• A Limio Offer is an 'enriched' view of the Zuora Rate Plan, including Display, Billing, and eCommerce Behaviour fields.

There are two primary ways you can configure a Limio Offer to work with Zuora:

Initial Price Price held in Limio and Zuora

External Price Price fully held in Zuora

Limio will define the Initial Price for the Initial Term. This is the price charged to the customer for the Initial Term. The Initial Price in Limio will override the pricing help in Zuora but only for the Initial Term. Once the initial term is over, the subscription will renew to the Zuora pricing. Why use this method? This is particularly useful if you'd like to have promotional pricing managed in Limio and if you use Limio for Salesforce. This allows to reduce product proliferation in the Zuora catalog, by only storing list prices or standard prices in Zuora and holding promotional pricing in Limio. Note that the promotional pricing will still make its way on each Zuora Subscription, so reporting isn't impacted.  When to avoid this method? If you are using a complex pricing in Zuora (for example usage-based with tiers), you cannot set the Initial Price in Limio.

Limio will let Zuora fully drive the prices, for both the Initial and Renewal Terms. In this case, Limio Offers will not hold any pricing information and will only refers to the Zuora Product Catalog. This is called External Pricing. Why use this method? This is particularly useful for complex pricing (e.g. tiered pricing). It also makes sense if third-party applications relies on the full catalog to be in Zuora. When to avoid this method? When your pricing is simple (e.g. 10€ per month) and your customers are very sensitive on performance (as external pricing requires API calls that are slower to preview the pricing).

⚠️This article will focus on Initial Price for subscription products. 

• For External Price documentation, including how to create tiered pricing, go to Using solely Zuora Pricing for Limio Offers (External Pricing).
• For other types of products:
  • One-Offs: How to configure a One-Time Offer
  • Gifts: How to sell gift products with Limio and Zuora
  • Discounts (%): How to create a Discount offer

This article will cover:

1. Configure the Zuora Rate Plan (when using Initial Price in Limio)

2. Surface in Limio the Zuora Products and Rate Plans

3. Configure a Limio Offer with Initial Price

1. Configure the Zuora Rate Plan (when using Initial Price in Limio)

From a Limio perspective, there are 4 important fields to configure in Zuora:

• Rate Plan name: The rate plan name will be used to link the Zuora rate plan to the Limio Offer.
• List Price: This will be used as the Renewal Price. With Initial Price set in Limio, it is expected that this is the full list price, after any promotions has been applied.
• Billing Period: This should match the Term in Limio.
• Price Change on Subscription Renewal settings must be set to 'Use Latest Product Catalog Pricing'.
  • This will allow to revert to the List Price set in Zuora after the initial pricing set in Limio.
  • If you don't see this field on your Zuora Rate Plan, please read Automated Price Change (Uplift) for Renewed Subscriptions.

See an example of a Zuora rate plan configured to work with a Limio Offer:

2. Surface in Limio the Zuora Products and Rate Plans

Please refer to Catalog sync between Limio and Zuora

3. Configure a Limio Offer with Initial Price

Now, let's walkthrough how to set up a Limio Offer and the corresponding Zuora price fields. You should get familiar with the various fields on the Limio Offer. Every offer in Limio includes:

• Initial Price (the initial price(s) of the subscription)
• Zuora Product and Rate Plans (the product and rate plan in Zuora)
• Term (the rate at which a subscription is renewed) 
• Auto Renew (whether a subscription will automatically renew until cancelled)
• (Optional) Allow Multibuy (whether a subscription allows multiple purchases)

Initial Price 

Within the Limio Initial Price field, you can set the initial charges for an initial period before any Zuora renewal. The Initial Price is usually the very first charge that happens at the time of order.

There are options compatible with Zuora:

• One charge, for example $189 for the first year or $189 per user for the first month. The number of charge must always be 1 - for example every 1 year for 1 charge. If you need the initial price to have multiple prices or charges, see below.

• Two charges, for example £29 one-off joining fee and £9 recurring fee.

• Multiple charges, for example $19 for the first 12 weeks, then $45 for the following 16 x 12 weeks. This will trigger a Deal Ramp in Zuora. To trigger it, you must use two charges as below:

Known limitation:

• Deal Ramp Offers will only work for New Subscription. It cannot be used for a Switch Offer (Downgrade or Upgrade). If you want to offer a Deal Ramp, you will need to Cancel the old subscription and process a New Subscription.

Zuora Product and Rate Plan

With Initial Price, the Zuora Rate Plan will be the price applied at renewal, after the initial term.

New experience: On the Limio Offer, go to Products. Select the Limio Product you have setup in How to configure Zuora Product Code (SKU) in Limio. Add a rate plan to it.

If you use Initial Price, set the split to 100%. If you are creating a bundle, then the split will differ. See How To Add A Product Bundle.

⚠️ Legacy experience: Before the Winter 2021 release, the Zuora Rate Plan was specified on the Offers attribute tab, through the attribute rate_plan__zuora (lease be aware this could have been labelled differently in your environment by your Limio Admin, for example renewal price). This legacy attribute is still backward compatible in current Limio version and users can still specify the Zuora rate plan on that attribute. However, we encourage to use the new experience as it allows additional flexibility such as defining bundles.

Term

With Initial Price set it Limio, Zuora must still receive the length of the Renewal Term, for example 1 month or 1 year.

Auto Renew

If the Auto Renew field is turned on, then the subscription will be set to auto-renew on the Zuora Rate Plan. If not, it will not auto-renew in Zuora.

(Optional) Allow Multibuy

If Allow Multibuy is on, the customer can purchase multiple subscriptions and the Zuora order will set a quantity on the subscription. This is often used for usage-based pricing models (e.g. per month, per user).