Products, e-commerce and pricing

Products held in the CRM as the source of truth: publications, standards, guidance, toolkits, downloads, merchandise, and access to things that are not physical at all. Product data, pricing and bundles are managed once and presented through the website, the portal or an invoice, so the catalogue does not exist in three places with three people responsible for keeping them level.

Price levels, customer-specific prices and product price levels, so a fellow, a student, a corporate contact and a non-member can see four different prices for the same item without anyone maintaining four catalogues. Because pricing resolves against the membership record, the member price is simply the price that member sees rather than a discount somebody has to remember to apply at the till.

Voucher codes with their own eligibility and expiry, applied at checkout and recorded against the transaction. Recording it against the transaction is the part that matters afterwards: it is how you answer what a promotion actually cost and who used it, rather than inferring it from a dip in average order value three months later.

Basket and checkout through the website or the member portal, settled through the same payment providers and written to the same invoice ledger as membership and events. One reconciliation, not three. Payment links cover the cases that do not go through a basket, such as an invoice raised by your finance team and paid without anybody needing a login, which is most of how organisational purchasing actually happens.

Ticketing and ticket bookings where an event or a product is sold as an admission rather than as a place. The distinction matters for anything with a capacity you are not managing as delegates: an awards dinner, a lecture, a members' evening. It behaves as a product rather than as a conference, which is simpler for everyone and keeps the income in the same ledger.

Everything a member has ever bought, visible to them in the portal and to your team on the record, which removes a substantial share of "can you send me a copy of my invoice" from the inbox. It is also useful in the other direction: what somebody has bought is a genuine signal of what they care about, and a much better basis for relevance than anything they told you when they joined.