A concept overview of Orbit Products: a purchasable logistics service whose price is calculated per transport, why a product can show no price or be marked unavailable, and the sales/purchasing split.
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Note
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.
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.
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:
Because the price is assembled this way, it reflects the actual job in front of you rather than a generic list price.
A product prices one or both sides of a deal:
Order.Tour.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.
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:
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.
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.
When you book in Orbit MissionControl, each side shows its products as a row of tiles you can scroll sideways. A tile shows the price, with its line items when you hover over it, and a mark only when something deviates; hover over the mark to see why. Choosing a tile opens that product's card below the row. Manual prices are cards below the row too: click one to use it. Set price manually adds a new one, and Add Product adds another product to the row.
When you create an offer, a sales product without a chosen payment method is on invoice, if your company takes bookings on invoice. The customer then accepts with one click and chooses no payment method. The menu on the card lists only the payment methods that are active. If one-click booking is not available, hovering over the note on the card shows what it still needs. A product with a Scheduling Preset uses the preset's times when the customer accepts, not the times in the transport data, and its card says so.
An offer with invoice is booked on invoice even if invoice is not active for the way the customer books, as long as invoice is active for logged-in customers or for customers without a login. If it is active for neither, nothing is booked: the customer is asked to contact you, and the reason appears in the transport's history. A customer who has to complete data before booking chooses from the active payment methods. If there are none and the offer has a price, the booking page says so and the customer cannot book.
In Orbit MissionControl, changing transport details refreshes the product offers, so the selected product is evaluated against the updated schedule. A selected product available on request can still be submitted as a request. On its card, a product available on request shows Set price, so you can enter the price yourself and then include the product in an offer. If you edited a price by hand and the product later calculates a different one, the card says so and offers Use Calculated Price. If a selected, automatically priced product becomes unavailable, Mission disables the booking action until the offer changes or you choose another date or product.
In Orbit MissionControl, dimmed text next to the amount on a Tour shows where the price comes from. On an Order, the source follows the Price heading when line items are present. Hover over or focus the information icon to read what the source means. Select the pencil icon to edit the price.
Product's current pricing produced the price.Editing line items by hand marks the price as manual. A later calculation does not replace those lines. Choosing a scheduling option or changing a Product's name or description does not by itself make its price manual. A fresh Product calculation can update a product-sourced price and identifies it as from product.
When a Carrier is assigned or changed, Orbit recalculates a product-sourced purchasing price with the matching purchasing Products for that Carrier and the Tour. If several Products can price the Tour, the lowest price is chosen. You can select another eligible purchasing Product when you want a different one. A price set by hand, from a callout, or by the Carrier is kept as it is.
Use Recalculate on an Order or Tour when you want its linked Product to price the current transport again. Orbit replaces the existing line items and sets the price source to from product, even when the current price was set manually, came from a callout, or was provided by the Carrier.
By default, Orbit uses the Product version valid at the Order or Tour's stored pricing date. If a newer version is currently valid, the preview lets you choose it. Selecting that option recalculates with the newer version and updates the stored pricing date. Otherwise, recalculation keeps the existing date.
A Tour that takes over the price changes of an Orbit partner organisation is the exception: while its price comes from the partner, neither Recalculate nor selecting another purchasing Product is possible, in Orbit MissionControl, through the Orbit API or through an AI assistant. To price that Tour with a Product again, first take its price back with Set Price Yourself, see Setting the price yourself.
An Order cannot be recalculated while its Tour also carries Shipments that do not belong to it, because the Product would price their stops and Loads too. A Tour cannot be recalculated while it carries Shipments of several Orders. In both cases Orbit gives the reason and changes nothing, in Orbit MissionControl, through the Orbit API and through an AI assistant.
This article is a concept overview. For building and running products, see:
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.
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.
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.
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.