Product Pricing Methods
It is likely that you will need to update product prices on a regular basis. Initially, however, you can set the price of a product in a catalog by using one of the following methods: direct pricing, indirect pricing, and custom pricing (price rules).
Direct Pricing
Indirect Pricing
Custom Pricing (Price Rules in a Virtual Catalog)
Discount Campaigns
Direct Pricing
You define the price for a product in the product itself. You can do this either when you create the product or when you edit it to change the price. For more information, see Pricing a Product in a Base Catalog and Pricing at the Product Variant Level.
Indirect Pricing
The price is determined by its association with a particular pricing category. When a product is associated with a pricing category, the price on the product is replaced by the price specified in that category. The original price of the product is restored when it is no longer associated with that particular pricing category.
Indirect pricing is typically used when you want to price a group of products the same way, for example, to create a special category where all products are $1.99. For pricing products indirectly, see Pricing Products in a Category.
Custom Pricing (Price Rules in a Virtual Catalog)
In a virtual catalog, you can apply price rules to a category, product, or product variant.
You apply price rules when you are creating a virtual catalog in an alternate currency, or when you are creating a virtual catalog that will be displayed only to a specific group of users, for example, members of a club who receive discounted prices.
A category, product, or product variant can have only one price rule.
You cannot define discounted pricing in a virtual catalog based on an attribute of a product. For example, you cannot add a price rule that says, "discount all products with a description property that contains red by 10 percent." However, you can write code to find all products that satisfy your criteria and add the individual price rules to them. For more information about writing code to find all products, see ICatalogManager3::Search. For more information about writing code to find procucts that satisfy your criteria and add individual price rules to them, see IProductCatalog3::AddPriceRule Method.
You can apply the following price rules to categories and products in a virtual catalog:
- Set Price. You specify the exact price of the product. For example, the product is selling for exactly $10.00.
- Add. You specify the exact amount to increase the base price.
- Add percentage. You specify the percentage of the base price that should be added to the price.
- Discount. You specify the exact amount to decrease the base price.
- Discount percentage. You specify how much to remove from the price. To reduce the price by 20 percent, you specify 20 percent.
For more information about custom pricing, see Converting Prices to an Alternate Currency.
Discount Campaigns
In addition to using virtual catalogs to discount product prices, you can also discount product prices by creating a discount campaign item. The advantage of creating a discount campaign item is that you can schedule the period of time for which the discount is applicable, and you can run reports on the effectiveness of the discount campaign. For information about discounting products, see Creating a Discount.
See Also
Using Current Product Prices vs Original Product Prices
Pricing a Product in a Base Catalog
Pricing at the Product Variant Level
Pricing Products in a Category
Converting Prices to an Alternate Currency
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