Price Level Scenarios

The Price Setting package can be used in the following scenarios:

For now, the package allows you to define only one Independent/Dependent group. It is prepared with the goal of supporting multiple groups (available in future releases). Independent price lists are a base for dependent price lists; this allows to create various pricing scenarios. For example: define an independent "global" price list and then define dependent "country" price lists that will have prices based on the "global" one.

The groups can be defined in the DependencyConfiguration PP and selected during PL/LPG creation using the configurator.

Price Handling

E-Commerce Package is tailored to be used in Dynamic Pricing Context. Therefore it supports price setting in Live Price Grids (LPG). Also, the Price Flexibility Package is fully compatible to "monitor" independent LPGs.

It is designed for B2C price setting. Therefore it operates completely on the List Price level. In the next version, there will be support for simple Tax Rules (VAT).

Product Segmentation

All parameters can be configured across segments of the product portfolio. During deployment and setup, you can choose up to 5 product attributes as "dimensions" to differentiate all the setup parameters. This way you can choose different pricing strategies, surcharges, etc. depending on different segments of your product portfolio.

Price Strategies

The Price Setting Package provides several built-in price strategies and you can also add your own. It comes with pre-configured price strategies tailored to typical B2C e-commerce price setting.

For detailed documentation see Calculation Engines.

Strategy Importance Configuration

Every strategy has to be properly defined. There are the following configuration options:

• 'Level' describes where the definition is valid – for a dependent or independent price list. If you want a strategy to be valid in both scenarios, you need to create two entries.

• 'Overridable' describes if this strategy can be manually overridden by selecting other strategy or a manual price or using an exception table.

• The remaining settings are used to order price strategies. 

The order works differently with independent and dependent price lists:

• Independent price list:

  1. Calculates base strategies.

  2. Calculates standard strategies.

  3. Removes base strategies which returned no price.

• Dependent price list is more complex, since it has several configuration options which tweak the strategies order:

  1. The first strategy is "Independent Level Adjusted Price" which is a FinalPrice from the independent price list for a given product adjusted by the dependency adjustment. It can be overridden by setting "No" for the "Prioritize Independent Level Price" column in the Strategy Selection PP. In this case, "Independent Level Adjusted Price" will be put at the end of strategies. It is a configuration on the product level.

  2. Base and standard product prices are calculated. However, they come in pairs with independent level adjusted prices, if the same strategy was calculated for a given product in the independent price list.

  3. Prices from the independent price list can be ignored on the dependent level by setting "Independent Level Only" to "Yes" in the Strategy Definition PP. 

  4. Dependent prices come in pairs with independent level adjusted prices (with dependent before independent), unless "Independent Level Priority" is set. Independent level priority is taken into consideration only when the strategy is defined for both dependent and independent level. It has to be set by an entry on the independent level.

Exceptions and Manual Overrides

Exceptions and manual overrides allow you to create custom price behavior which does not follow the default rules. Depending on the configuration you can allow for exceptions on a line level in a Price List / LPG, through a specific exception table or both/none of them. Depending on configuration, some elements will be hidden or shown in used Price Lists / LPGs:

• Manual Price / Manual Price Decision – Fields that allow you to type price and comment by hand. This price will be used as a final used price with comment as the price decision.

• PriceSelector – Drop-down field where you can choose one of the already calculated prices.

Exceptions and overrides can be configured separately on a dependent and independent level. Detailed configuration description can be found in Exceptions and Manual Override Allowance Config.

Hierarchy

Calculation logics contain the final output values. One of them is a price decision (which contains info about which price / price strategy we calculate, or reason for a price) and the other is a Final Price which contains a price after calculations. Exceptions and overrides have a strong connection to these values. With the default settings, our hierarchy looks like this:

We can skip some levels of this hierarchy by changing the Manual Override Allowance configuration. For example, when we set the Independent Manual Override for a price to "ExceptionTable", it will disable the Manual Price Override from this hierarchy.

Price Checks

Some price checks are performed on calculated results. Values for price check results are configurable in the respective pricing parameters.

Sales and Forecast data

The calculation will show the following information when transaction data lookups are configured:

• Historical Data

  • Last Year Sales Volume

  • Last Year Turnover

  • Sales Volume YTD

  • Turnover YTD

• Forecast Data

  • Sales Volume Forecast

  • Turnover Forecast

Details of possible lookup and configuration options can be found in Transaction Config and Projection Config.

Standard Configuration

Technically, E-Commerce Package is a pre-configured version of Accelerate Price Setting Package and it can be freely fine-tuned using all Price Setting Package configurations and features. By default it comes with some standard configuration. This includes some structures (PX, PP) as well as pre-configured data in configuration PPs.

The following items are included in the configuration:

• Product Extensions

  • Cost

  • Inventory – Used for Stock Data

  • RecommendedRetailPrices – Used by the sample engine configuration

• Price Parameters

  • Sample configurations for different initially configured engines 

    • CheapestAffordableAdditionalConfig

    • CheapestAggressiveAdditionalConfig

    • CostPlusAdditionalConfig

    • RRPLookupEngineConfig

  • Data containers configured for different features:

    • PricingExceptions

  • Pre-configured parameters

    • DependencyMappingConfig

    • ExchangeRates

    • PriceSettingConfig

    • RelevantCompetitionData

    • StrategyConditions

    • StrategyDefinition

    • VolumeBreakdownExceptions