Understanding Products & Pricing

A Product is a purchasable logistics service you offer to shippers. Its price isn't a fixed number in a catalogue — Orbit works it out for each transport when the service is chosen.

Who this is for: operators who want to understand what a Product represents and how a price appears — or doesn't — when booking. It is a concept overview, not a build guide; if you configure products, the build guides are linked at the end.

What a product is

A Product is a sellable logistics service — a same-day courier, an overnight pallet service, a temperature-controlled run. Rather than storing one fixed price, a product describes how to price a service and whether it can be offered at all. When someone chooses the product for a specific transport, Orbit runs that description against the details of the job — the route, the load, the timing — and produces the price and terms for that particular move.

This is why the same product can return one figure for a Paris to Berlin run and another for a London to Manchester one, and why a price only exists once there is a real transport to price it against.

How a product is assembled

A product is built from a set of modular building blocks, sometimes called bricks. You don't need to work with them to book, but knowing the four kinds explains what a product decides for each transport:

Context — gathers the shared facts the other blocks need, such as the route or the vehicle type.
Feasibility — decides whether the service can be offered for this job at all.
Pricing — produces the priced lines that add up to the quote.
Scheduling — offers the bookable time slots or windows for the service.

Because the price is assembled this way, it reflects the actual job in front of you rather than a generic list price.

Sales, purchasing, or both

A product prices one or both sides of a deal:

Sales — what the customer pays. This lands on the Order.
Purchasing — what it costs you to have a carrier carry it out. This lands on the Tour.
Sales and purchasing — both sides, from a single product.

The two are different numbers for different audiences: a customer sees the sales price on their Order; a carrier only ever sees the purchasing-side rate on the Tour.

When no price is shown — this is normal

A product doesn't always come back with a bookable price, and that is valid, expected data rather than a fault to fix. Evaluating a product against a transport has three possible outcomes:

A price — the service is available and can be booked at the price shown.
Price on request — the service is available, but a price can't be worked out automatically for this job. Instead of a figure, the customer is offered the chance to request a quote, which reaches an operator to price by hand.
Unavailable — the service can't be offered for this particular transport, usually with a short message explaining why, such as a load that is too heavy for the service.

So a product card that shows no price, or is marked unavailable, is telling you something true about that specific job — it is not a broken price. Operators enable the request path with the Allow Requests option on a product, and the wording of the request prompt shown to the customer is configurable.

Where you see products

Products appear as selectable cards while you build a transport in the TransportComposer in Orbit MissionControl, and to shippers booking in Orbit Hub. Each card shows a price, a request prompt, or an unavailable note, depending on the outcome above.

Learn more

This article is a concept overview. For building and running products, see:

Products — the full guide to composing a product.
Calculator Widget — an embeddable price calculator.
Product Messages — the notes and alerts a product can show while pricing.
Product Testing — checking a product's output before it goes live.
Product Metrics — the figures behind a price, such as distance and travel time.

FAQ

Why does a product show no price?
Because the price for that specific job can't be worked out automatically, or the service isn't available for it. If requests are enabled, the customer can ask for a quote instead; otherwise the card shows the service as unavailable, usually with a reason. Both are valid outcomes, not errors.

Why is the same product a different price on two bookings?
A product prices each transport on its own details — route, load, and timing — so the figure changes from job to job. There is no single stored price to look up.

Does every company have products?
No. Products are Orbit's pricing layer, and a company that prices its services elsewhere may have none. In that case a price is set by hand rather than calculated.

Why doesn't the carrier see the price the customer paid?
The customer's price (sales) and the carrier's rate (purchasing) are separate figures. A carrier only sees the purchasing-side rate on the Tour, never the sales price on the Order.