Launching subscription bundles quickly and confidently is crucial for resellers and content providers. The Digital Vending Machine® (DVM™) from Bango includes a dedicated Sandbox environment designed for this purpose. Sandbox simplifies integration testing, accelerating time-to-market for subscription bundling offers. DVM Sandbox includes an archetype reseller (BangoTel) and content provider (Bango Music) to simulate responses and allow Bango customers to test real use cases and verify the quality of their flows before engaging the other party in the offer. This drives the fastest time to market.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to get started with DVM Sandbox from a reseller perspective. We’re going to work through from scratch to a successful “purchase subscription use case,” covering key actions including creating a consumer offer, confirming successful creation via the “get consumer offer” endpoint and even confirming via DVM Back Office Dashboard. Grab your API credentials (here) and follow along as we go through this fundamental subscription bundling use case. In a later guide, we will cover the content provider perspective, although there is a lot of commonalities between the reseller and content provider view.

Note: We’re going to use basic authentication for this walkthrough, but DVM supports other authentication options which you can discuss with Bango when building out your onboarding to DVM.

Don’t forget, we covered the whole orchestration and offer creation as well as plan lifecycle in our blogs. Knowing these concepts will be sort of essential.

What you’ll need:

1. API credentials (here)
2. Developer docs (here)
3. Blog Postman collection – get in touch for the demo collection

Overview of DVM Sandbox use cases

The Bango DVM Sandbox environment is an exact replica of production. API surface and behavior match production; configuration and data can differ. Therefore, it’s perfect for using test data to validate the quality of all the use cases needed for subscription bundling, content provider or reseller you work with.

Key use cases include:

1. Purchase subscription
2. Activate subscription (new account)
3. Activate subscription (existing account)
4. Terminate a subscription at the end of the billing period
5. Upgrade product in the subscription
6. Suspend a subscription

As an aside, use case 3 is an essential use case for a good user experience, check out the recent Bytesize webinar where Subscription Bundling expert Graeme Wafer goes through this.

In this guide, we’re going to follow use case 1, the purchase subscription flow, detailed in Bango DVM documentation, imagining a consumer taking up a subscription to Bango Music.

If you haven’t already signed up to use the Digital Vending Machine®, you need to do so before you can access and start integrating with DVM APIs. We’re so confident in the Digital Vending Machine® and the APIs that are the defacto standard for subscription bundling that you can get access to DVM Sandbox without a Digital Vending Machine® license.

1. Complete the form here to initiate this process
2. Bango Support team will then contact you with credentials that can be used in DVM Sandbox

Bango provide Postman collections for you to get going even quicker, with ready-to-use collections – get in touch for the demo collection. You can of course use any other API testing tool.

1. Import the DVM collection into your Postman workspace
2. Set environment variables for username and password 
3. Check the endpoint is correct:

We can test the credentials and API endpoint by fetching the offers set up. You’ll have Bango Music product and a simple offer available by default. 

Go to the GET Offers request in the collection. The endpoint URL should look like:

The GET Offers returns a list of all the offers configured on the products and associated tiers available in your catalog. In the sandbox demo collection, you can see that the reseller can see that there is 1 product available (Bango Music). The product has 2 product tiers (standard and premium). The Bango Music offer is a forever free subscription to Bango Music Premium. The concepts of products, offers and how they relate to subscription bundling are covered in this post.

Now we know our API credentials are working. We also can see the evergreen free offer on Bango Music that is live. The next step is to simulate a consumer redeeming that offer. 

For this purchase subscription use case let’s take a quick look at the sequence diagram for this use case. It starts with a purchase by the consumer. It ends with a pending entitlement. With 1 API request, we’re going to do all this. 

Note: Sequence diagrams like this, detailing the use case flows are something Bango Delivery teams work with you when you start subscription bundling with DVM. There are many, detailed use case flows that Bango Delivery teams ensure fit your requirements and maintain the use of DVM APIs as the standard.

The Postman collection we’re using has a Consumer Offer API request that is going to simulate the consumer clicking that purchase button on whatever form factor you might choose to use. 

Within the DVM CX, once signed in, this button changes to “Start setup”, it triggers the consumer offer API request. After sending that request in, DVM’s offer orchestration takes that request and makes everything happen, including the create entitlement call needed and the communication to the content provider. 

• Find the POST Consumer Offer request. The endpoint URL should look like

• Set the environment variables needed. A random string for consumer identifier and the Offer identifier which matches the GET Offers we did in step 2

• Switch back to the request, which looks a little like this and hit SEND

You’ll get a HTTP 202 response as DVM responds asynchronously, confirming the request and then orchestrating everything behind the scenes. DVM executes:

1. Asynchronous HTTP 202 response to the sender
2. Creation of an entitlement, pending state, from the consumer offer
3. Sending a POST entitlement request to the content provider (Bango Music) to create the entitlement

We now need to verify the flow. We’ll do this in 3 ways, just to show how much verification can be done with DVM to ensure quality subscription bundling and reduce disputes between parties. We’ll check through the API, check in Dashboard there’s a new pending, and check in Care too.

Verification 1: Get consumer offer API

First let’s verify using the DVM API.

• Find the GET Consumer Offer request. The endpoint URL should look like:

• Copy the consumer offer identifier returned in the 202 response and paste it into the endpoint URL, replacing the {{consumerOfferIdentifier}} and hit send

Look at the response. In it, we’ll see the information returned on the consumer offer and the entitlement – it’s even got the activationURL needed for the activate use case. 

Tip: Click the activationURL and you’ve actually completed the simplest flow of activate use case, get your air guitar ready!

Verification 2: DVM Back Office Dashboard

As mentioned, DVM Sandbox is a production replica, which means Back Office tooling is also available. Along with your API credentials, you should have received Back Office user credentials.

• Sign in to DVM Back Office (backoffice.sandbox.bango.com)
  

Look at the basic Dashboard metrics and you’ll see a new “Pending” entitlement created

Note. If this is your first request, you’ll only see 1 pending entitlement, this image is on my demo environment that already has entitlements. Bango Care and Dashboard are tools for monitoring offer uptake, no waiting 24 hours like in BI tools with data warehouses, you may need to wait up to 30 minutes to verify this request.
 

Verification 3: DVM Back Office Care

While you’re in the Back Office, take the navigation to Care in the top right. Bango Care is a capability of DVM that supports resellers and content providers to resolve issues for their consumers.

1. Take the {{entitlement-id}} from the GET Consumer Offers request
2. Search for that entitlement
3. Check that the entitlement state is correct

In the image above you’ll see consumer ID XXXX has a pending entitlement to Bango Music.

That’s it, we’ve completed our purchase subscription use case. We spotted the obvious follow up of the activate use case and using activationURL and redirecting the user to sign in to their service. We’ve verified the quality of our integration with these endpoints in 3 ways. The confidence of our integration is high as we have onboarded to DVM and so we know our integration is rock solid. The next step is to complete all use cases need for subscription bundling, self-certify with Bango and then start working with content providers in the same Sandbox before moving to production.

In this guide we’ve onboarded to DVM Sandbox as a reseller, using the purchase subscription use case to demonstrate how to onboard. Time and time again Bango customers have seen that DVM Sandbox has proven to achieve:

1. Faster launches: Streamlined integration and faster deployment
2. Enhanced reliability: Catch and resolve issues before customers do
3. Greater confidence: Launch with proven, tested systems ready for scale

Using the Bango DVM Sandbox with its production matching APIs, using test data gives resellers and content providers the confidence to accelerate subscription bundle launches effectively and at scale.

Contact us to find out more.