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An integral part of an e-commerce system is to display accurate and up-to-date prices to customers as they select products on your Web site. The C3 Pricing application provides a graphically intuitive user interface to maintain prices for products through your Web browser. See CHAPTER 17, Pricing Administration for the tasks associated with pricing.
Bear in mind the distinction between list prices and extended prices:
For example, in the following line item, the first price displayed is the list price ($9.95), and the second price is the extended price.
Product ID List Price Quantity Extended Price MXWS-1000 $9.95 120 $1194.00
The precision to which prices are displayed is controlled by system properties. See Application Settings for more information.
The Comergent eBusiness System uses price lists to manage the access that customers have to products and to display appropriate prices to each customer. As shown in Figure 4, a price list is a combination of products and prices. The process for creating price lists is as follows:
Enter basic information about the price list such as effectivity dates, and so on. During creation, you decide which products you want to assign to the price list, depending on criteria such as customer type, and so on. See To Create a Price List.
Each price list has a supplier ID associated to it. The supplier ID is used to determine how price lists are used when calculating the price to be displayed to a user as follows:
If a partner administrator creates a price list, then the supplier ID is pre-populated as a read-only field. If an enterprise administrator creates a price list, then they can accept the default supplier ID which is "1". They can choose to enter the partner key of any partner: if they do this, then the price list is used when the partner is selected as the supplier for a product.
You can set the prices by category or by individual product. You can also set special prices by creating special pricing rules for product categories or for individual products. These rules make a price conditional on qualities belonging to a partner or order. See Conditional Pricing.
This is how you enable customers to see products. When users log into the Web site, they see only the products on price lists associated with their partner. See To Assign a Price List to a Profile.
In this release, you can set effectivity dates at the line item level. By default, the price of a line item is effective for the effective period of the price list. However, if you override the price list effectivity dates by specifying effectivity dates at the line item level, then you can specify a special price for a particular period. This means that the same product ID can be present more than once on the same price list. If a product ID shows up more than once, then its price is derived by taking the lowest of the effective prices.
In an example, illustrated by the Figure Price List Line Item Effectivity Dates, a price list is effective from 12/01/2003 through to 12/01/2004. One product ID, ProductID1, is listed three times:
The following table provides prices for ProductID1 on various dates.
Note that throughout this time period, ProductID2 continues to be priced at $30.00.
This section describes how prices are calculated when they are displayed to a user.
If your company uses its own pricing engine to determine prices, instead of the Comergent eBusiness System pricing engine, then you can set a business rule to "Entitlement Only" instead of "Entitlement and Pricing". When you set the rule for entitlement only, you still add products to price lists. You still assign the price lists to partners, but only as a means of determining which products the partner is entitled to view and purchase. You do not use the price lists to assign prices to the products since the prices are derived from your company's own pricing engine. See the Comergent eBusiness System Implementation Guide for information about configuring your system to get prices from an external source.
You create and maintain price lists from within the Price List Detail page in the Pricing Administration module. The first step is to populate the list with products. You must decide what kind of products should be included in this list.
You add products to the list by moving through a product hierarchy of product categories and products. You can either select a category and assign all the products to the list, or you can select individual products from the category. When you are done adding products from one category, you can move on to another category, and so on until you have added all the products you want.
The Product List Detail frame (where your selections are displayed) displays one category of products at a time. As you click another category, the frame will refresh itself. If the price list already contains products from that category, then the products will appear in the Product List Detail frame.
The previous section described how products are assigned to price lists. Once you have assigned products to lists, you assign the prices to the products. You assign prices in two ways: a default price that applies if none of the conditions are met, and a price applied by determining if certain conditions are met.
The number of decimal places supported by C3 Pricing is a configurable parameter. See Setting Prices for Products for more information. |
You assign default prices in the Price List Detail frame using one or both of the following methods:
The price information includes a list price, a +/- discount percentage, and a +/- absolute amount. You can use one or both of the above-named methods. For example, an easy way to assign prices might be to assign category price information, then modify individual products in the category as necessary.
In addition to the default prices, you can create conditional prices dependent on one or two factors relating to partners or orders. For example, you can set price information that applies only if the partner's membership level is gold and the order quantity is between 5 and 10 units.
You can create rules that apply to all the products on the price list within a product category. You can create rules that apply only to a specific product within a category. You can create multiple rules for a category or product. In a case where a customer satisfies more than one rule, the lowest price applies.
Once you have created the price lists, making them available to customers is a two step process. The first step is to make the price list "active" by checking the Active box on the Price List Detail page. Once you have done that, the second step is to assign the price list to one or more partners. To Assign a Price List to a Profile describes the step-by-step process for making price lists available.
You can assign zero or more price lists to each partner. When a customer belonging to the partner enters your Web site, the price lists determine (a) the products that the customer is able to view and (b) the prices that are displayed when the customer adds products to a cart.
You can assign an inactive price list to a customer. That is, you can assign a price list whose Active box is not checked. Inactive price lists have no effect on the customer's buying experience until you activate them by checking the Active check box.
Each price list has a unique currency associated with it and a unique customer type. Using the price lists, you can determine that not all products are available in a particular currency. Similarly, not all products are sold to a particular customer type.
When a customer first logs in, they are assigned an initial customer type and currency based on their partner. You can let customers change either the currency or customer type or both as they navigate through your Web site. If you do so, then bear in mind that the prices that they see can change.
If one of your profiles is a parent in a hierarchy of profiles, then you can assign price lists to the parent so that those price lists are automatically assigned to any profiles below the parent in the hierarchy. For example, in Figure 6, Partner A is parent to Partner B and Partner C. Partner C is parent to Partner D and Partner E. If you assign a price list to Partner A and mark that price list as sharable, then that price list is automatically assigned to Partner B and Partner C and, in addition, to Partner D and Partner E.
When assigning price lists to the child partner of a parent, you will notice a dollar sign ($) next to any list that is shared with the parent (and therefore automatically assigned to the child). However, you can still assign that price list to the child and mark it as sharable. This guarantees that the price list will still be assigned to the child (and to its children), even after the assignment is removed from the parent.
The AnonymousUserPartner is a partner profile that come predefined with the Comergent eBusiness System. The existence of this partners enables anonymous users to "log in" and select products. Note that the user does not realise that they have been logged in: this happens invisibly to the user so that session can be maintained as they navigate through the Comergent eBusiness System.
When an anonymous user logs in, they see prices and products determined by the price lists assigned to the AnonymousUser Partner. If an enterprise administrator changes the assignment of price lists to the AnonymousUserPartner, then the changes take effect immediately. As new anonymous users "log in", they see prices determined by the new assignment. Existing anonymous users, that is users already browsing the product catalog anonymously at the time the assignment is changed, will continue to see the old prices.
Partner administrators can also create and maintain price lists for any products to which their partner has access. These products include products maintained by the partner (see Categories and Products Managed by Partners) as well as products created by enterprise administrators
See CHAPTER 9, Administration Performed by Partner Users for more information.
When you implement the Comergent eBusiness System, an Enterprise Master Price List is automatically created and automatically assigned to the enterprise. This price list is used to provide prices for reporting purposes, but it can also be assigned to profiles just like any other price list.
Typically, the Enterprise Master Price List should contain all the products in your product catalog. When you create a new product, or when you import new products into your catalog, you add these new products to the Enterprise Master Price List (in addition to any other assignable price lists). In this way, the products can be picked up by the reports if the Enterprise Master Price List is designated as the reporting price list. This is the default setup: if you want to change to a different reporting price list, then see Prices in Reports for more information.
The currency of the Enterprise Master Price List is referred to as the Enterprise currency. If it is being used as the reporting price list, then it is used in reports in which values are calculated, but where no currency has been specified.
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