Get started with pricing

Optimizely Configured Commerce has several options to control product pricing. There are also options for complex pricing structures, such as pricing at different quantity breaks or pricing for different customers.

Basic and list pricing is one price for all customers. This involves setting a price directly within the Admin Console or through an integration. 

Use the following steps to configure the basic list price within the Admin Console: 

Sale pricing, often used with Basic Pricing List Price, can be set for a product on the Product Details page of the Admin Console. The value of the Basic Sale Price field supersedes the Basic List Price. The sale price is controlled by setting a schedule for the sale price using the Basic Sale Start Date and Basic Sale End Date fields. The website displays the sale price and basic price, along with the amount and percentage saved in italics. You can configure these settings with the Show Savings Amount and Show Savings Percent settings.

Use the following steps to set the sales price for a product.

The price matrix lets you create flexible pricing options based on customers and products. It uses logic to create a hierarchical pricing structure, which can be used by many ERPs.

The price matrix is a generic construct that can store complex pricing information across various ERP systems. It is intentionally non-normalized data to create a data structure that can perform the calculations with minimal latency. It does have its limitations, such as a maximum of 10 price breaks.

Each ERP or custom application of the matrix can use different data in specific fields (RecordType, CustomerKeyPart, ProductKeyPart, CalculationFlags) as needed to accommodate the pricing functions.

Price filtering is not available when using Price Matrix.

The pricing matrix uses a methodical procedure to determine product costs. It applies a universal strategy to set prices, making modifications based on the specific ERP in use.

The general process flow for pricing is as follows:

Configured Commerce provides the option to display quantity-break pricing on the website.

Quantity-based pricing is available for both price matrix and real-time implementation. For the Quantity-Based Pricing table to display on the website for real-time implementation, quantity breakpoints and pricing are required as a part of the real-time call response data. For price matrix, the Quantity-Based Pricing table displays on the website if the quantity breakpoints and pricing are found within the Configured Commerce Price Matrix table.

Several conditions must be set in the Admin Console to use Quantity-Break Pricing for the price matrix. The steps are listed below.

Along with these settings, you must set up a price matrix record for the product. Price matrix records are typically created through integration. See Configure the price matrix for information.

Items set with Quantity-Break Pricing display a link for Quantity Pricing. Hovering over the link displays a box showing the quantity pricing breaks and the savings percentage.

Ecommerce websites often must provide customers with pricing and inventory information in real-time. Use real-time pricing or inventory for any pricing or inventory changes made in the ERP throughout the day, rather than waiting for the next refresh. You can configure Configured Commerce to enable real-time integration jobs. Rather than running the pricing refresh or inventory refresh job on a recurring schedule, you can configure the platform to run the integration jobs every 500 milliseconds. Configured Commerce has a real-time pricing plug-in architecture that developers can use to call any pricing service or API. Real-time pricing calls are made as users go through the website but are cached to improve performance. Pricing information is loaded asynchronously from the rest of the page, letting users quickly navigate the website and not wait for pricing information to load.

If using real-time pricing, the maximum value for the Price Sort Maximum setting is 100. Any greater value prevents price sorting.

For Classic CMS, the number of products in the results must also be less than or equal to the value of the setting for the Sort by Price option to display. If a user selects Sort by Price, the server calculates the prices and sorts the results.

When product pricing is set to $0, you can make that pricing valid for a product in Configured Commerce. This prevents an error message from displaying when the product is added to the cart. To enable $0 pricing, follow these steps in the Admin Console:

Configured Commerce lets you configure a site message for products with invalid pricing (rather than using the default message).