Introduction
The hosted order page and the hosted customer portal offer an easy and fast way to integrate pre-fabricated self-service forms into your own website.
The hosted order page is a registration form for new customers that can be used to place orders.
The hosted customer portal is a self-service page for existing customers to view the services they have booked, independently change invoice or payment data, cancel the contract in due time or, for example, download invoices and credit notes already received.
Both the order page (Hosted Signup, registration form) and the customer portal (Hosted Customer Self-Service Portal) can either be reached via a link and passed on to your customers, or the pages can be integrated into a separate website via iFrame.
All settings for the self-service pages can be found under "Settings > Integration > Self-Service Settings".
Hosted order page
You can access the hosted order form via "Products > Plans > Plan Variants" by clicking on the hand symbol.
Please take into account that you should activate the Checkbox "Allow self-service signup for this variant" in Plan Variant settings, so that the link with a hand-button became visible.
Example page of the order form:
Displayed products
Each link on a hosted order page leads to a plan variant and all components in that product family to be displayed on the order pages. Whether a specific component should be listed in the order pages can be defined in the respective component by using the option "show in self-service signup". If the component is activated for the order page, quantity based and on/off components can be freely added to the shopping cart by the customer.
Metered usage components can only be displayed as information in the "Usage fees" section using the "show as pricing information in self-service" option. More about components can be found here.
Design
The hosted pages can be fully customized. This includes the color design of the pages and the integration of your own company logo. Furthermore, you can configure which fields of the invoice address are to be displayed and which of them are mandatory fields, optional fields and which fields are not required. Optionally, you can activate a field for entering a coupon code.
If you want to offer the hosted pages in different languages, you can store appropriate translations and display them for the desired customer. All settings can be found under "Settings > Self Service".
For more information on customizing the design, please click here.
Terms of contract
If contract terms are to be defined, so that a customer must agree to certain terms and conditions and, if necessary, explicitly confirm them in order to complete the order process, you can create the necessary checkboxes or link the necessary information. Further information about the configuration options for contract terms and conditions can be found here.
Hosted customer portal
Example page of the customer portal:
Access to the customer portal
Access to the customer portal is via a time-limited token. The expiry time of the self-service token can be configured under "Settings > Self Service".
Access via the UI
The link to the hosted customer portal of a contract can be accessed in the UI via "Customers > Contract Details > Perform Action > Self-Service Access".
Access via own app or website
An access token for a specific contract can be requested via REST API. This allows direct access to the customer portal in your own app or website.
In the developer documentation you will find the function with which you can request the self-service token for a specific contract via REST API.
Access via link in an e-mail
If you do not have a separate login area for your customers, you can send the link to the customer portal with each new invoice/credit note or reminder e-mail. To place the link in the e-mail, go e.g. to "Settings > Documents > Invoices > E-Mail Template" and place the placeholder {SelfServicePortalUrl} anywhere, which will be replaced by the personal link that can be called up for a limited time.
You can use the same placeholder in the credit note email template and the reminder email templates.
If the link to the customer portal is to be delivered in the respective customer language, the placeholder {SelfServicePortalUrl} can be supplemented by a URL suffix of the language, e.g: {SelfServicePortalUrl}?language=en For more information on how to deliver a specific language, click here.
Displayed areas
For the customer portal, it can be set which areas the customer is allowed to view and change and which not. Detailed instructions can be found here.