Catalog Items

Catalog items are customizations of offers and bundles that are offered to a specific group of subscribers.

A set of catalog items can be purchased as a purchase package to dynamically group the catalog items and package them so they can be purchased as a single unit. For more information, see the discussion about purchase packages.

You can use catalog items as is or further customize their pricing details like price, quality, and quantity of service customizations at purchase time. You can use parameters that you define in My MATRIXX for these customizations, or template fields in custom MATRIXX Data Containers (MDCs). You can assign eligibility features, set eligibility requirements and exclusions, and add commercial metadata fields to reference any required commercial information.

You can set a private balance to expire upon full consumption (0 balance). After all balances are expired, the owning catalog item and owning bundle are removed from the system.

Important: When a catalog item is purchased, some bundle and product offer properties are saved in the purchased offer data in the subscriber, group, or device object. The following purchased offer data properties are not updated when the properties are updated in pricing:
  • The expiration policy of the bundle or product offer is saved in the purchased offer data at the time of purchase.
  • If a purge profile is specified for a particular catalog item, expired offers for that item are purged from the wallet after the amount of time specified by the purge profile.
  • If a bundle definition has bundle price components at the time of purchase, the purchased offer data is marked to be a proportional charge bundle.
  • If a one-time offer has cancel pricing components and a refund period defined at the time of purchase, the purchased offer is marked as a refundable one-time offer in the purchased offer data.
Catalog users create catalog items using My MATRIXX. They specify these details that turn an offer or bundle into a catalog item:
  • Parameters. At purchase time you can specify a value for the parameter using SubMan APIs. If a new value is not specified, the parameter default value is used.
  • Values for the configurable list of template fields (pricing details) users can change.
  • Metadata name/type/value tuples. These can take the form of any information that external systems can use to customize a catalog item for a specific market segments.
  • Assign eligibility features and set eligibility requirement and exclusion rules.
When a catalog item includes a contract offer, during validation the system verifies:
  • The contract object exists in the system.
  • Any filters associated with the contract exist in the system.

Catalog items can be revised but not kept as multiple versions.