Mid-term upgrades
The Mid-Term Upgrade capability in VIP Marketplace enables a partner to upgrade a customer's product subscription to a higher-tier product, like from Teams to Enterprise, at any point during their current term. This means a customer no longer has to wait until the renewal cycle to make changes.
Advantages of mid-term upgrade
- Customer flexibility: Customers can access advanced features and higher-value products when needed, without waiting for the end of their subscription term.
- Revenue acceleration: Partners can capture upsell opportunities immediately, which improves annual recurring revenue and reduces deferred income.
- Pricing transparency: Provides prorated pricing, corrected discount levels, and refund estimates.
Upgrade path
Customers can choose from a set of pre-defined upgrade paths for their product subscriptions at any point during their current term. A few examples:
- Acrobat Pro Teams to Acrobat Studio Teams
- Acrobat Studio Teams to Acrobat Studio Enterprise
- Acrobat Creative Cloud Teams to Acrobat Creative Cloud Pro Teams
You can use the GET Product Switch Paths API to retrieve the upgrade paths that are available. Upgrade paths include a switchType
indicator that defines whether the upgrade must be full or can be partial:
Full switch
The entire quantity of the original subscription needs to be upgraded to the new product.Example: All 100 seats of Acrobat Standard Teams need to be switched to Acrobat Standard Enterprise. The upgrade path will be marked as FULL_ONLY.
Partial switch
You can either switch the entire quantity or a certain number of the original subscription quantity.Example: Out of 100 seats, only 40 are switched to Acrobat Standard Enterprise, and the remaining 60 stay on the original product. If upgrade path is marked PARTIALLY_ALLOWED, the partner can perform either a partial or full upgrade.
Note: After a full switch, only the new product renews. After a partial switch, both products renew. The subscription's anniversary date remains unchanged.
Reassigning users
During a mid-term upgrade from one Teams subscription to another, partners can automatically reassign users from the original subscription to the upgraded product. To enable this feature, include the query parameter reassign-users=true
when submitting the switch order request.
User reassignment follows a Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) strategy, meaning the most recently assigned users are reassigned first.
Note: Automatic user reassignment is not supported for upgrades from Teams to Enterprise or between Enterprise subscriptions.
Limitations
The following limitations are present in this release:
- Complex upgrades excluded: Combining multiple single apps into All Apps is not supported due to complexity in license mapping and pricing.
- Partial upgrade restrictions: Certain partial upgrades may be limited based on product eligibility or financial viability. Subscriptions tagged as high-growth offers or specific global customer products are excluded from switch eligibility.
Mid-term upgrade process
The following figure illustrates the upgrade process:
For more information: