Products in Salesforce

Products in Salesforce is a service or item the company sells to the customers. After defining the products, you can associate them with the prices you have established in the price book.

• Products are available through a related list on the Opportunities tab.
• With Salesforce you will have layouts and custom fields to track which products are successful. Products can then be added to a Salesforce opportunity allowing you to ensure that inventory and forecasting are accurate.

Important Fields:

Product Name:

It is a required field used to describe the label of the product. The name should be given in a way so that it is easily recognized.

Product Code:

It field stores the product code which uniquely identifies the code. The code can only be numeric or it can be a mix of digits & alphabets.

Active:

It is a checkbox field, if checked then only the users will be able to associate this product with an opportunity.

Product Family:

It is a picklist field used to categorize the products. To add/remove categories, edit the Product family picklist field.

Related Lists:

Standard Price

Every product has a baseline price, that baseline price is stored as a standard price.

Product History

Product History tracks the field history of a particular product.

Pricebooks

A pricebook is a list of products and their associated prices. Each product and its price is called a pricebook entry. The price book will provide a list of the products and the different prices for the products. Salesforce will provide standard and custom price books, making it easy to have multiple prices for a product.

In other words we can say that sometimes your prices for products will differ per customer – it can depend on who is buying, when they are buying, or in what quantity. To accommodate this flexibility, a Product can exist in Salesforce with many different associated prices, using a feature called Price Books and Price Book Entries.

A Product can exist in multiple Price Books, for every different price on offer to a customer. The combination of the Product and the price together is what we call a Price Book Entry. Price book is divided into two parts:

1. Standard Price Book:

The Standard Price Book is the full list (i.e. the master list) of all the products and services your company sells. It is already present and new products can be added to it using the related list present at the product’s detail page.

2. Custom Price Book: 

These are additional pricebooks created as per the requirements of the company. The price for each Product in the Custom Price Book may be different from the price in the Standard Price Books. The price for the same Product in each Custom Pricebooks does not need to be the same – it can vary from one Custom Price Book to another.

Important Fields:

Active:

If checked, then the pricebook is available to users for adding a product to a opportunity otherwise not.

Related Lists:

Products

It shows the list of products added to this pricebook.

Price book History

It describes the field history of a pricebook.

Notes:

Products are related to opportunities using an object called an Opportunity Product.

An opportunity can have only one pricebook associated with it and only the products present in that pricebook are available to add in the opportunity. If some products are already added to an opportunity using a particular pricebook and if you want to change the pricebook then all the products already added to the opportunity will be removed automatically. The cost of the products added to an opportunity is aggregated and displayed as Amount in opportunity record.

Let us head to the next chapter, Service Application.