Turning products into services

A product in your master data is not yet something a customer can order. To make it orderable, it has to exist as a service in your portfolio.

You can build that service from scratch and map the product to it afterwards. But when the service and the product correspond one to one, the Products tab offers two shortcuts that do both steps at once. Select one or more products and both buttons become available.

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Create service

Create service opens the full service dialog for a single product, running through Service details, Pricing model and Images.

Two things are already filled in when it opens: the service name is taken from the product, and the product itself is sitting in the bill of materials at the bottom of the first step. You can add further products there, or open Add new product to create one on the spot.

That is the part worth understanding. This route does not just create a service — it creates the mapping along with it. For a service that offers exactly one device with no options, the whole configuration is done in one pass, and there is nothing left to do on the Mapping tab afterwards.

The remaining fields behave exactly as they do when you create a service from scratch: Category and Context, the two switches for subsequent employee and location changes, EAN / GTIN and External ID, a brief description, and Activate (offer in the marketplace).

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Offer product

Offer product is the shortcut. The button carries a counter of how many products you have selected, and it turns each of them into a service in your portfolio in one go — useful when you want to make a batch of devices orderable without configuring each one individually.

It asks for far less: a Category and a Context, and then three switches.

• Activate (offer in the marketplace) makes the resulting services visible to customers immediately
• Enable price synchronisation keeps the service price aligned with the product behind it, rather than fixing it at the value it had on creation
• Publish offer for all direct customers publishes the offer to your direct customers rather than limiting it to a selection

Because there is no name field, no description and no bill of materials to edit, this route always produces a one-to-one service: one product, one service, mapped to itself.

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Which route to use

Use Offer product when the product is the offer and you want it orderable quickly, especially for several at once.

Use Create service when the service needs its own name, description, images, or a bill of materials with more than one item in it.

Use neither when you want the service to stay abstract enough to point at a different device next year. A service called Standard tablet can be re-pointed at a newer model without customers noticing and without you rebuilding the offer. A service named after a part number cannot. In that case, create the service first and map it deliberately.