Selling Sites

With Selling Sites, a subscription plan sells a whole website. The buyer names their new site and its administrator during checkout, pays, and gets a running site of their own a minute or two later. The site keeps running for as long as their subscription is current.

Creating a site happens after the purchase, in the background, so a slow or failed setup never loses a sale: the customer always has a record of what they bought, and a site that could not be created is retried and, if needed, handed to an administrator.

Menu	Subscriptions > Site provisioning (administrators), Subscriptions > My Sites (customers)
Permission	Manage subscriptions (Site provisioning), Manage own subscriptions (My Sites)
Feature	Subscriptions - Sites, available on the main (default) site only

Can't find it?

What you see depends on your role. If the menu, a button or a setting on this page is missing, ask your administrator to give you the permission listed above or to turn on the feature. Only administrators can turn features on and change site settings.

Set up a plan that sells a site

A site plan is an ordinary subscription plan with the Tenant Onboarding part added.

1. Open Content > Content Definition > Content Types and edit your plan type, or create one as described in Subscriptions.
2. Click Add Parts, tick Tenant Onboarding, and save.
3. Open a plan of that type. In Tenant Onboarding, pick the Recipe the new site is set up from, for example a blog or an agency site. It is required.
4. Set the price and billing terms as for any plan, then click Publish.

When a customer signs up for that plan, the checkout adds a Your new site step:

Field	What it does
Site name	Letters, digits, and underscores, starting with a letter. It identifies the site and cannot be changed later. It must not already be taken.
Site title	What visitors see. The customer can change it at any time.
URL prefix	The part of the address after your domain, for example contoso for a site at your-domain/contoso. It must not belong to another site.
Custom domains	Optional domain names the site answers on, separated by commas, such as contoso.example.com. They must not belong to another site.
Site template	Shown only when more than one template is available. It starts on the plan's recipe.
User name, Email, Password, Confirm password	Under Site administrator: the account the customer signs in to their new site with. When the customer comes back to this step, Password can be left blank to keep the one already entered.

Everything the customer can fix is checked on this step, before they pay: a taken name, a domain or prefix that belongs to another site, or passwords that do not match. See Checkout for the rest of the purchase.

Choose the database new sites use

New sites are created on the database chosen on the Tenant Onboarding tab of Settings > Subscriptions (permission Manage subscriptions settings). The buyer never chooses it.

Field	What it does
Database for new sites	Every site sold is created on this database. Sqlite (a file per site), the default, needs no database server.
Connection string	Required for every provider except Sqlite. It is stored encrypted and never shown again: leave it blank to keep the one already saved, unless you change the database. Each site gets its own table prefix, derived from its name.
Schema	Optional. Leave blank to use the provider's default.

My Sites (for customers)

My Sites lists every site the customer bought, and opens the ones that are ready.

Badge	What it means
Being created	The site is paid for and is being set up.
Retrying	The last attempt failed and another one is scheduled. Nothing for the customer to do.
Ready	The site exists. Click Open to go to it and sign in with the administrator account entered at checkout.
Needs help	The site could not be set up. The page says We could not finish setting this site up. Please contact support.

Each row also shows the Site name and when it was Bought. While a site is still being created, the page notes that a new site usually takes a minute or two to appear; reload the page to see its progress.

Site provisioning (for administrators)

Site provisioning lists every site that has been bought, with the job that creates it. Use it to spot sites that could not be created and to try them again.

Status	What it means
Waiting	Paid for and waiting to be created. The site checks for waiting jobs every minute.
Being created	Being created right now.
Created	The site exists and the customer can sign in.
Retrying	The last attempt failed and another is scheduled, with a longer wait after each failure.
Abandoned	Creating the site failed 5 times, so it is no longer retried. The customer has paid and has no site, so a person needs to act.

Each row shows the site name, its status, the Owner, when it was Bought, the number of Attempts, and the last error in red when there is one.

• Use the status filter in the list header to show one status, for example Abandoned, or Any status for all.
• Use the pager at the bottom, and Items per page to show more or fewer rows.

Retry a site

Use Retry now when a job is Retrying and you have fixed the cause, so you do not have to wait for the next scheduled attempt.

1. Fix the cause shown in the error, for example the database for new sites.
2. Click Retry now on the job. It is offered on Waiting and Retrying jobs; not on a job that is Being created or Created, and not on an Abandoned one, which can't finish.
3. In the confirmation, click Retry now to try creating the site immediately, or Cancel.

The page then says The site was created. or The site was not created. The job is queued for another attempt. A retry starts a fresh count of attempts.

Abandoned jobs need a person

For safety, the administrator password the customer entered is discarded once a job is Abandoned, so the site can no longer create it and Retry now isn't offered. Create the site by hand, give the customer its administrator account, then close the job as described below, or refund the purchase.

Close an abandoned job

Once you have created an abandoned job's site by hand:

1. Optionally, type the site's address in Site URL (optional) on the job's row. The customer gets an Open button for it on My Sites.
2. Click Mark as created, then click Mark as created in the confirmation box.

The job becomes Created, and the customer sees the site as Ready. Only an Abandoned job can be marked as created.

When the subscription ends

A sold site runs for as long as its subscription is current, including the period the customer already paid for after cancelling and the grace period after a failed payment. When the subscription is no longer current, the site is disabled: it stops serving visitors, but nothing is deleted. If the subscription becomes current again, for example when the customer pays a late renewal, the site is enabled again exactly as it was.

Tips and troubleshooting

• Site provisioning or My Sites is missing. Subscriptions - Sites can only be enabled on the main site. Ask your administrator to enable it there.
• A job is Abandoned. Read the last error and fix the cause so the next sale does not fail the same way. Then create this customer's site by hand from the site management screens and mark the job as created, or refund the purchase from Commerce > Payments (see Payments and refunds).
• The customer says their site disappeared. Check their subscription under Subscriptions > Agreements. A site whose subscription expired or was cancelled is disabled, not deleted.
• The Recipe list on the plan is empty. Only setup recipes are offered. Ask your administrator which site templates are installed.