Special Pricing

There are two ways to set up special pricing for your customers and products. You can use price rules to set up prices based on special conditions, such as discounts for certain products and customers. You can also use promotions to set up discounts and incentives.

Price Rules

IMPORTANT: price rules will only be run if a product has a List Price associated with it.

Price rules are a series of rules which help determine the prices of products. Each rule is a series of conditions and actions. When a price is needed for a product, opentaps will search through all price rules and use the applicable ones to generate the price.

WARNING: When several price rules are applicable, the price of the product will be the sum of all the applicable price rules. Therefore, be careful to set up conditions of your price rules so that they do not accidentally overlap.

Price rules allow far greater flexibility in pricing than would be the case with traditional systems. You can use factors such as products, product catalogs, quantity ordered, and identity of the customer to determine the final price. The actual price can be based on List Price, Default Price, Average Cost, or Promotional Prices, as entered in the Catalog Manager's Product > Prices screen.

Price rules are maintained in the Catalog Manager's [Price Rules] tab. Click on the [Price Rules] tab, and you will see a list of rules shown, along with their active dates. There is a link for toggling between viewing all rules and just currently active ones. You can click on any rule to view it, or create a new rule.

By clicking on a rule or creating a new rule, you are taken to the price rules screen. The price rules screen has three sections: general rules information, conditions, and actions. The general rules information section allows you to enter a name for your rule and the range of dates for which it is valid. It is possible, for example, to enter price rules that will start at a future date (such as a Summer sale), or to "sideline" old rules in the system but keep them around in case they are needed again. There is also a toggle button next to "Sale Price" to indicate whether the price is a sale price or not.

The conditions section specifies a series of conditions for activating the price rule. The conditions include a field, a comparison operator (equals, not equals, greater than, less than), and a value. As the price rule is run, each field will be tested against the value to see if it is true. You can use the rules to specify:

• Product or products for which the rule is applicable (using fields Product, Product Category, Product Catalog.
• Website for the rules
• Quantity of purchase
• Identity of customer (“Party,” “Party Group Member,” “Party Classification,” “Role Type.”) Party refers to a partyId. Party Group member refers to the partyId of a Party Group (such as a corporation) and would be true if a party were part of the party group. Party Classification and Role Type are set in the party manager.

For example, you can use Product and Quantity conditions to set quantity-based pricing. You can use Party or Party Group Member to specify a discounted price for special customers. You can use Product Category or Product Catalog to limit any of these rules to a specific portion of your product range.

IMPORTANT: For a price rule to execute, all of the rule's conditions must be met.

Once the conditions are met, the actions are what determine the final price of the product. You can specify the following actions:

• Flat Amount Override – set the price to this amount, ignoring any other pricing information. Use this to set a flat price (such as 99 cents) on any item which meets the rule's conditions.
• Flat Amount Modify – modify the price by a flat amount.
• Percent off Average Cost, List Price, Default Price, Margin – allows a price to be based on any of these price types (as input in the Product > Price tab.) To give a discount of 20% off the list price, for example, specify Percent of List Price and -20.

When multiple actions are specified, all of them will be run. If there is a Flat Amount or Promotional Amount override, however, these will be used to obtain the final price, and all the other actions will be ignored. If not, the final price will be the list price plus all the actions of all the price rules which apply.

Promotions

To prevent a product from being used to calculate the order total for promotion purposes, set the "Include In Promotions" flag to "N" as follows:

* From the Main Navigation page,
* Click: [Catalog] Icon, the Catalog Manager Main page opens.
* Open the desired Product page using the "Product ID" if you know it, with the 
     [Edit Product] button, or 
* In the Search Products box, enter the product name or other search criteria, then
* Click: [Find], 
* Click: the desired product in the resulting search list.
* The "Edit Product" page opens on the [Product] Tab, displaying a page of general characteristics
* Click the [+] box for the line item labeled "Miscellaneous".
* The line item expands displaying items including this one:
     "Include In Promotions", Click: the drop down box button, Select: "N"
* At the bottom of this "Edit Product" box, 
* Click: [Update Product] button.

Now, this product will not be included in calculating qualifications for promotional campaigns in any of the stores where this product is sold.

If this flag is not set, the product will be added to the order total for calculating whether the order is eligible for a promotion.