We've mentioned our new billing and account management system casually over the last few months, but today, we're giving our first "official" preview of what's about to be launched. There is a lot of stuff involved in the coming release but in this post, we're going to focus on the biggest new feature — automated client billing. This functionality will be available exclusively on LightCMS.

A preview of the website detail page in the new billing system (using sample data). 

What is Automated Client Billing?

LightCMS has always given you the ability to manage all your client websites within a single account, but this new release makes huge improvements in the way you manage them. To this point, all websites under your account have been billed to a single credit card. The idea has been that we charge you our discounted rate and you bill your clients whatever you wish through your own billing system.

Automated client billing now offers you another option. You can choose to bill an individual website to a client's credit card directly. You set the price that the client pays and we pay you commission on the difference between our discounted price and the price you set.

If you bill my clients directly, won't they find out about LightCMS or Element Fusion?

No. We'll be running all CMS charges through a generic entity and that entity's name will show up on your clients' statements. You'll just want to tell them to expect charges from this new entity for their website service. We've even set up a website on the new entity's domain to help explain the charges in a non-branded way in case they have questions. Oh, and the entity's website's domain utilizes private registration as well.

How much commission can I earn?

With automated client billing, you decide how much commission you'll earn. That's because you set the pricing for the websites under your account. Our base pricing always stays the same, so the higher you set your pricing, the higher your commissions will be. If you utilize our suggested retail pricing, you'll earn around 35% commission on every website, every month. Of course, you can set your commissions higher or lower if you wish.

How do I receive my commissions?

Once you have websites paying through client billing, your profits will accumulate in what we like to call "your money pile." You'll see your money pile on most of the pages in your account management console. Whenever you're ready to withdraw them, you can simply click on "withdraw funds" and we'll send them to you by PayPal. PayPal is the only option (for now), so you'll need an account to withdraw your funds.

Do I have to use client billing?

No. When we roll out the new features, all of your websites will continue to bill to your account. You will have to manually change them to client billing if you choose to do so. You can move any number of your sites to client billing and the rest of your sites will remain billed to your account. You can also change a website back and forth between client billing and account billing whenever you wish.

Can my clients upgrade / downgrade their own websites?

Yes, if you choose to let them. You'll have to login to the account section and set up the names and prices for your website plans. Once you do that, clients who are being billed individually will be able to login and upgrade / downgrade their website. The pricing and plan names they see will be what you set for them to see. Also, clients who have free websites under your account will be able to upgrade themselves to one of your paid plans if they wish (you can turn off this functionality if you want). We'll cover more on how this works as we get closer to launch. Plus, it's all explained very clearly inside the new interface.

What else is new?

There's an improved user interface across the entire account management section; a simplified, filterable listing of all websites under your account; a full detail page for each of your websites; the ability to delete or disable any website under your account; detailed listings of billing activity for your account and for each client-billed website; and much more. We'll be sharing more about all of these features in the days ahead.

Enough already! When's it going live?

We know that many of your have been looking forward to this for a while, as have we! We are very, very close, but we want to be cautious about putting hard dates out there in case something unexpected happens that pushes things back. That said, we are unofficially and tentatively planning to launch everything on Thursday, June 11th, 2009. Again, that date might change so please don't make any plans around it. We're simply providing it to keep you in the loop on our plans.

We've added a new video to our arsenal of CMS resources. "Getting started managing your website" is a four minute overview of basic CMS functionality. It's designed to get a new user up to speed quickly on what they need to know. Topics covered include: logging in, recognizing the toolbar, switching between admin and preview, recognizing editable regions, adding content elements, adjusting settings on content elements, utilizing the "explain this" help links, adding pages, adjusting page settings, and using the page manager and user manager.

The video is unbranded which means it's available for you to use as your own tool for your own clients. You can simply grab the embed code from the video below and paste it into your own site. Or, if you're using our reseller scripts, this video has been added to the features listing (if you're using the video option), and it will be added to the video script by the end of tomorrow.

Today, we took live the LightCMS pricing plan changes that were announced on Tuesday. All existing websites on the LightCMS system had their pages, users, storage and pricing updated to reflect the new plans. In addition, you will now see the all-new ADVANCED plan as an option when you go to upgrade a website under your account.

I don't see the new ADVANCED plan in my reseller script!

Don't worry, if you're using our reseller pricing grid scripts, you won't see the new ADVANCED plan added. In order to avoid "breaking" your scripts by adding in a new package for which you haven't set your own pricing or name, we decided to leave the old reseller pricing script intact as is. We did update the storage and users on the PLUS and PRO plans to their new levels, but those are the only changes you should see in the old script. This script will now stay as it is for all time. Please note this means it will not be updated with any new features or changes from this point forward.

So, you'll want to upgrade to our new script which will display the new ADVANCED package and will continue to be updated automatically as new features are added or other changes are made. Luckily, it's very easy to update your script. You just need to do two things:

1. Change the script reference from "ResellerPricingGrid.js" to "ResellerPlans.js"
2. If you are setting custom pricing or custom package names, you'll need to modify those to include the ADVANCED plan (you'll now be setting six packages instead of five).

We've added two new feature demonstration videos to our reseller marketing scripts. This includes our features list with video script and our video content script. If you are using these scripts, you don't have to do a thing, the new video content has been added automatically. Of course, you can also access and embed this video content directly on your own. Simply visit our Blip.tv CMS demos show page to get the embed code.

And for those of you who just want to watch, the videos are included below. Enjoy!

The Built-in Image Editor

The Photo Gallery

Chad just added a new tutorial video to our support site on the basics of adding text and images with the text editor. This video is unbranded and can be used by resellers on your own sites. To do so, just visit our CMS Tutorials show on Blip.tv where you'll find this video along with other tutorials that are available. Use the embed code provided by Blip to display on your own site.

To check out the video yourself, you can visit this article on our website support site.

We're releasing another marketing script that you can use as a reseller to promote our CMS to your own clients in an unbranded way. This one is all about video. Earlier, we announced our features script with video which provides a complete features listing with links to launch videos about the features where available. The new video script generates just the video content, with the videos embedded right into the page so the user can view them without leaving the page or launching a separate window. The content includes all of the same feature videos included in the feature list, but just set apart by themselves in a different format.

Get started

You can find instructions on using the video script here on our account support website. You can also view an example of this script embedded into one of our default templates.

Please note, the video script currently only contains two feature videos, but there are more to come. New videos will be added as they are available. You won't have to do a thing once you've implemented the script on your site. All additions will happen automatically.

A couple of weeks ago, we announced our new CMS Demos show on Blip.tv which houses the unbranded marketing videos we create and make available for you to use as a reseller (for more information, please review our original post). Well, we've made a slight enhancement to our system by adding a second show, CMS Tutorials.

Both shows contain unbranded videos that are available for you to use on your own sites. The CMS Demos show will house marketing-related feature overviews while the CMS Tutorials show will house support-oriented videos on how to use the system. Separating these two types of content will allow you to better control the user experience on your site. So, you'll likely want to subscribe to them both. You can use any content from either show however you see fit. We plan to add many more videos to both shows in the weeks, months and years to come.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The Photo Gallery Slideshow tutorial will be moved from the CMS Demos show to the new CMS Tutorials show. If you previously embedded this particular video, you will need to re-embed it from its new location. We will be removing the video from the old location at the end of day tomorrow (Tuesday, November 25th). We apologize for this inconvenience. This is a unique situation and this type of re-embedding should not be required in the future.

Resellers, as you know, we've started creating some unbranded video content to demonstrate the CMS system. This content provides you a simple way to use our video marketing work to promote the CMS to your own clients. As we mentioned in a recent post, we are including feature demo videos inside our reseller features script, which gives you a way to drop a full features list onto your own web page complete with link that launch video demonstrations of features where available.

Yesterday, I published a new video tutorial on the blog. This is different than a feature demo and it won’t be included in the features list script. But, the content is still unbranded and could be helpful as you market the CMS to your clients.

So, here’s what you do

In an effort to provide you a way to utilize this content outside of the context of the reseller scripts, and to utilize any video content that’s not included in the reseller scripts, we’ve set up an unbranded “show” on blip.tv (our video hosting provider). The show, simply called “CMS Demos,” will contain every unbranded feature demo, tutorial, and CMS-related video content that we produce. Here’s the link to our show page: cmsdemos.blip.tv

When you access the show page, you’ll notice that you can view the episode archive to browse available videos. You can also grab the embed code for any video to drop it onto your own website. In fact, if you want, you can even subscribe to the show and get episodes delivered to you as soon as they are released. This access gives you a lot of flexibility to use our video content how you want.

Note: as long as you use the blip-provided embed code to display the videos on your site, they will stay up to date, even if we later update the videos to reflect new UI changes, features, or for whatever reason.

Another note: you will know whether or not a video is included in the reseller feature list because any video that is included in this list will be prefaced with "Feature demo:" in its title.

Enjoy

So, please feel free to utilize the video content found in our show in whatever way you wish to promote your CMS to your clients. The inventory of videos is minimal right now, but we plan to continue to add videos in the weeks and months and years to come.