- How to: Internal Use Products
- How Internal Use Products Work
- Set Up Internal Use Products
- Adding Internal Use Products to Orders
- What Customers See
How to: Internal Use Products
Internal Use Products give you the flexibility to manage special charges and fees while maintaining clean, focused catalogs for your customers. Your team gets the tools they need to handle unique situations, while customers see a streamlined product selection that focuses on your core offerings.
Some Use-Cases:
Design Fees: Mark your design consultation or CAD work products as internal use only. Add them to customer orders as needed, and they'll appear on the invoice without cluttering your customer catalog.
Freight and Delivery Charges: Create freight charge products for different regions or delivery methods. Add the appropriate freight product to each order based on the customer's location or delivery requirements.
Installation Services: Keep installation and field service products internal. Add them to orders when customers request installation, with all the details and pricing configured on a per-job basis.
Custom Fabrication Work: For specialized custom work that doesn't fit your standard catalog, create internal-use products that you can add with specific attributes and pricing for each unique situation.
Rush Jobs: Add additional fees to cover the cost of expedited processing (beyond just rush shipping charges)
⚠️Important Notes⚠️
- All standard product features work with internal-use products (attributes, pricing formulas, price overrides, customer-specific pricing tiers, tax exemption settings)
- Internal-use products follow all your existing catalog validation rules
- Once a product is marked as internal use only, it cannot be accessed by B2B partners even if you later want to enable B2B access
How Internal Use Products Work
When you mark a product as "Internal Use Only," it becomes hidden from your customer's catalog view but remains fully accessible to your team. Employees can add these products to any order, configure their attributes and pricing just like any other product. Once added to an order and saved, the product immediately becomes visible to the customer on their order page and all output pages (invoices, order confirmation, etc)
Think of it this way: your customers can't select these products themselves, but once you add them to an order, they become a normal part of that order for the customer to see.
Setting Up Internal Use Products
To mark a product as internal use only, navigate to a product setup page and look for the "Internal Use Only" checkbox.
[Screenshot: Internal Use Only checkbox in product setup page]
When you check this box:
- The product disappears from your customer-facing catalog
- The product remains visible in your employee catalog views (this is based on the user logged in, no need for your employees to do anything special to see these products)
- The product becomes unavailable for B2B partner access
- All existing product functionality remains the same (category selection, pricing formulas, attributes, tax settings, etc.)
Use the Internal Use Products filter in the black sidebar on the Products page to see all of your existing internal use products. You can use it alone to see only internal-use products, or combine it with other filters (for example, "Internal Use" + "Images" shows only internal-use products that have images attached).
Adding Internal Use Products to Orders
Your team can add internal use products to any order except those with a "Shipped" status. The process works exactly like adding any other product:
- Open the order you want to edit
- Access your product catalog from within the order
- Add the product to the order
- Configure attributes, quantities, and pricing as needed
- Save the order
⚠️ Internal Use Products can be searched in the search bar or found in the categories they've been assigned to in the product editor.
You can add internal-use products alongside regular products in the same order, add multiple instances of the same internal-use product, and mix them freely throughout your order. No special permissions are required - if you can edit orders, you can add internal-use products.
What Customers See
As soon as you save an order with an internal-use product, that product becomes visible to the customer. This happens immediately, regardless of the order's status (whether it's a bid, verified, in progress, etc.). The customer will need to refresh their page to see the newly added products.
Internal-use products appear on all customer-facing materials:
- Order pages in the customer portal
- Invoices and quotes
- Packing lists
- Cut lists and production reports
There's no special formatting or badge that identifies these as internal-use products once they're on an order - they look like any other product line item.
‼️ All internal use products will present as read-only products for customers on their orders. ‼️
For internal use products, customers will see:
- A lock icon next to the product name
- All input fields and buttons disabled for that product line
- A tooltip on hover that says "This item cannot be modified"
Customers cannot edit the quantity, attributes, or any fields for read-only products. They also cannot remove, duplicate, or copy these products within the order. However, they still have access to the info icon and can expand or collapse group attributes to view product details.
These restrictions apply across all customer-facing interfaces, including the customer portal and mobile views.
Working with Duplicated Orders
When you duplicate an order that contains internal-use products, those products are not included in the copy. This is intentional: internal-use products are typically situation-specific, so they need to be manually added to each new order as needed.