1.3 Resellers and agents

Voipswitch supports multilayered ownership structure. The client type accounts constitute the lowest layer. The client accounts can belong to more complex entities such as resellers. The resellers are further divided on three levels connected in one to many relationships where 3^rd level can own resellers of the 2^nd level and the 2^nd level can own resellers of the 1^st level.

Note: Only resellers of the 1^st level can directly own client accounts. An exception is the UC/PBX client type which can be owned directly by reseller level 2.

Another type of accounts are agents. The agents must always belong to a reseller.  Their role is to create and manage client accounts. The difference with reseller level 1 is that an agent cannot create nor manage tariffs.  Also their access to the client’s data is limited.

The layers are served by the system in realtime meaning that the credit control application controls balances of a user on each level and ends the call when any of the balances in the structure has been depleted.

Real time handling of resellers allows the resellers to create and assign to users their own rate plans (tariffs) and subscriptions. The provider assigns a base tariff to resellers and controls the resellers’ balances in real time regardless of balances and charging of reseller’s users.

The agents are not charged per account airtime but per topups and new account creations.

 The main purpose of the resellers support is to enable selling VoIP services through a network of service distributors, which can provision their end-users themselves through the web portal.

The system’s architecture allows for a great level of personalization per reseller:

• resellers can have a branded, customized user portal (VUP);
• the Onnline Shop can be configured separately for each reseller (using its own online payment gateways);
• calling cards – resellers can have their own, exclusive access numbers which are accessible only for their customers (blocked for other resellers’ accounts);
• plans and packages support – the billing system behind the reseller structure is based on separate tariff plans associated with each reseller account. Resellers can create their own rates sheets for their users or sub-resellers.

localization – multi-currency support, multi-lingual interfaces