Types of resellers
Your account has been provisioned either as a direct reseller
(1-tier) or a distributor (2-tier). You can confirm your account type in the
Settings page of your Partner Sales Console. Direct resellers show as
RESELLER, while distributors show as DISTRIBUTOR.
General Channel Services concepts
Figure 1. Diagram of the relationship between the Channel Services concepts presented in this document.
Accounts
An account is the top-level entity and maps to your
reseller domain. All other resources are rooted under it.
You will need your account_id — found in the Settings page of your
Partner Sales Console — when making calls to the Cloud Channel API.
Customers
Customers, typically a company, are the end-users of Google Cloud products you place orders for. In an n-tier resale channel hierarchy, customers are the leaf nodes.
Entitlements
Entitlements represent services that are billed to you, but used by one of your Customers.
For a SaaS offering like Google Workspace, an entitlement would be a subscription for one of the services (e.g. Google Workspace Business Starter or Cloud Identity Premium).
For an IaaS offering like Google Cloud Platform, an entitlement would be a consumption-based billing account that customers can use for their projects.
Offers
Offers represent what you are allowed to sell. An Offer and a Customer are the main components of an Entitlement.
Offers are a combination of a SKU and a pricing model. For example, a single product with various payment plans or discount levels would have as many offers as there are permutations of the product and the plans or discounts.
For Google Workspace, offers don't change price. When prices change, new
offerIds are generated.
Reseller domain
A reseller domain is a Google Workspace instance where you can manage access privileges to your Partner Sales Console.
Channel partner links
Channel partner links are only applicable to distributors.
Channel Partner Links represent the connection between a distributor and their authorized indirect resellers. Distributors are required to register their channel partners with Google.
Contact your Partner Manager for more details on this process.
API-specific concepts
Cloud identities
A cloud identity is the footprint for Google Workspace and Chrome customers, and the foundational set of customer features, including access to admin.google.com and user management.
You must provision a cloud identity with Google Workspace-specific data before creating an entitlement for a Google Workspace or Chrome product.
Operations
Operations are also called long-running operations (LRO). They are used throughout the Cloud Channel API, as many actions triggered by API calls are not instantaneous, and can take longer than default client timeouts.
Operations are asynchronous API calls. Endpoints that use operations
might return either HTTP 4xx errors (due to synchronous validation) or an
HTTP 200 code with an Operation resource, and the operation's identifier.
To get the status of an operation, use the operations.get method.