White-Label & Reseller Distribution: Partner-Driven License Provisioning

Challenge

A company makes a no-code workflow automation platform. It sells some subscriptions directly, but most go through about thirty resellers. Many of them offer the platform under their own brand, as part of their consulting or IT services.

Every reseller sale started with an email to the vendor’s operations team: “please set up customer X with plan Y”. That took a day or two, which is a long time when a reseller is in the middle of closing a deal. At the end of each quarter, operations matched those emails against reseller reports to work out what each partner owed. And resellers who sold renewals in their own web shops had no way to deliver them, other than another email.

Approach

Each end customer is a licensee, whichever channel it came from. The plans are the same for everyone:

Product: FlowBuilder
└── Module "Plan" – Subscription
    ├── Team, 1 year:     TIMEVOLUME 1 YEAR
    └── Business, 1 year: TIMEVOLUME 1 YEAR

Resellers provision their own customers

Every reseller gets its own API key with the role ROLE_APIKEY_OPERATION, as described in the reseller FAQ. With it, the reseller’s CRM or provisioning script creates the customer and the plan at the moment of sale:

curl -u apiKey:RESELLER_API_KEY -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -d "number=RS14-ACME-LOGISTICS" -d "productNumber=FLOWBUILDER" \
  -d "partner=RS14" \
  https://go.netlicensing.io/core/v2/rest/licensee

curl -u apiKey:RESELLER_API_KEY -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -d "licenseeNumber=RS14-ACME-LOGISTICS" -d "licenseTemplateNumber=TEAM-1Y" \
  -d "startDate=2026-11-05T00:00:00Z" -d "partner=RS14" \
  https://go.netlicensing.io/core/v2/rest/license

The licensee number starts with the reseller’s code, and partner is saved as a custom property on both the licensee and the license. The customer can start working right away. Resellers bill their customers themselves, under their own brand and at their own prices. NetLicensing doesn’t appear in that relationship at all.

Because every reseller has its own key, the vendor can revoke one reseller’s access without affecting the others.

Renewal codes from a reseller’s web shop

Some resellers sell renewals in their own online shops, which don’t know the customer’s licensee number. For them, the license transfer feature helps. When a renewal is sold, the reseller’s shop creates a temporary licensee with the renewal license on it, marks it with markedForTransfer=true, and gives the customer that temporary licensee number as a “renewal code”.

The customer enters the code in the platform’s settings, and the platform moves the licenses to the customer’s real licensee:

curl -u apiKey:YOUR_API_KEY -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -d "sourceLicenseeNumber=RENEW-7KQ2-M9XD" \
  https://go.netlicensing.io/core/v2/rest/licensee/RS14-ACME-LOGISTICS/transfer

The transfer works only for licensees marked for transfer, so a customer can’t move licenses away from someone else’s account.

Billing resellers

At the end of each month, the vendor’s billing job lists the licenses created in that month, groups them by the partner property, and invoices each reseller the wholesale price. Commission terms and invoices live in the vendor’s accounting system. NetLicensing provides the record of what each partner provisioned.

Direct customers go through the NetLicensing Shop as usual. The platform validates every customer the same way, whether it came direct or through a reseller.

Results

• Resellers set up customers from their own systems immediately, without waiting for the vendor’s operations team.
• Resellers keep their brand, prices and billing relationship with their customers.
• Renewals sold in resellers’ web shops reach the right customer through renewal codes and license transfer.
• The vendor bills each reseller from license data tagged with the partner, instead of matching emails against reports.

Running a reseller or white-label channel? Contact us to discuss partner provisioning.