Tier Groups
Group products into a ranked ladder so customers upgrading between tiers pay only the difference.
A tier group turns related products into a ladder, like Bronze / Silver / Gold, so a customer who already owns a lower tier pays only the difference when they move up. No separate upgrade products, no manual price maths.
Dashboard → Content → Tier Groups. Available on every plan including Free, for subscriptions and one-time products, across all game types including Minecraft.
Without one, a customer on Iron Rank who wants Obsidian pays the full Obsidian price having already paid for Iron. Most people don't, and you lose the upgrade.
How it works
When a customer owns a product from a tier group and buys a higher-tier product from the same group, PayNow charges only the difference instead of treating it as a new purchase. Downgrades work in reverse, without losing existing access.
For subscriptions:
Upgrade
Applies immediately. The customer is charged the prorated difference for the remainder of the current billing period and receives the new tier straight away.
Downgrade
Scheduled for the next renewal. They keep the current tier until the renewal date, then drop.
Customers see pending tier changes on the storefront, so a scheduled downgrade is never a surprise.
For one-time purchases, pricing is cumulative: someone who bought Bronze and wants Gold pays the difference. You don't create Bronze→Gold, Silver→Gold and so on; the group derives the price from what the customer already owns.
Tier order
Tier rank comes from the order products appear on the Products page, not from price.
The first product listed is the lowest tier; the last is the highest. If your ladder is VIP → Elite → Premium, they must appear in that order on the Products page, whatever they cost.
Get this wrong and upgrades charge the wrong amount, or a customer "upgrading" is silently processed as a downgrade. Reorder the Products page to change the ladder.
Creating a tier group
Go to Content → Tier Groups.
Click Create in the top right.
Enter a Name, for your reference only. Customers never see it. For example
Ranks.Click Create.
The group appears in the list, empty. Products are assigned from each product's own page, not from here.
Assigning products
Open the product.
In the right sidebar, find Tier Group, labelled "Used for cumulative pricing and subscription upgrades/downgrades".
Select the group from the dropdown.
Save.
Repeat for every product in the ladder. A product can belong to only one tier group. For the rest of the product form, see Creating a Product.
Email verification
Where customers sign in with just a username or in-game name and no Steam login, PayNow requires email verification before a tier change goes through. That stops someone who merely knows a player's name from interfering with their subscription. Steam-login stores skip it; the identity is already verified. You don't configure this. PayNow applies it based on how customers authenticate.
Custom storefronts
A headless or custom storefront means implementing the upgrade and downgrade flows yourself against the Storefront API. See the Tier Groups API reference.
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