Overcome common pricing challenges
Review some of the common pricing challenges that were explored in our previous case studies to understand the rationale behind the decisions.
After completing this page, you should be able to:
- Identify and solve common pricing challenges that enterprise customers often face.
In this section, we'll explore various complex pricing challenges that often arise in large-scale enterprise environments, some of which came up during our case studies in the previous pages.
Selection overrides
When managing pricing in Composable Commerce, one common challenge is ensuring that the correct Price is applied when multiple Distribution Channels are available. This is where selection overrides come into play.
What are selection overrides?
Selection overrides let you specify a particular Distribution Channel for a Cart item, locking its Price to that Channel. Instead of the system searching through all available Channels for a matching Price, you can mandate the use of a specific Channel. This ensures that the Price applied to the Cart item is uniform and aligned with your business needs.
Why use selection overrides?
Imagine you have several Distribution Channels available for your store, and each Channel could offer different pricing. If you want to ensure that a particular Channel's pricing is applied—perhaps for a special promotion or staff discount—you can use selection overrides. This way, the Price is not left to chance or determined by broader matching logic, but is controlled to match the chosen Channel.
Practical applications
Selection overrides are useful in scenarios where you need to apply a specific pricing strategy, such as:
- Staff discounts: instead of using Customer Groups to determine discounts, you can use a dedicated Distribution Channel that handles staff pricing. By assigning this Channel to the Cart item, you ensure that staff members always receive the correct discount.
- Targeted promotions: if you have a promotional campaign tied to a particular Channel, selection overrides can ensure that only the promotional Price is used, avoiding any potential confusion with Prices from other Channels.
How it works
When adding a product to the Cart, instead of relying on Composable Commerce to determine the best matching Price, you provide a clear directive: "This line item must use this specific Channel." The system then locks the Price to that Channel, ensuring uniformity and reliability in the pricing applied. You can do this by using the setLineItemDistributionChannel update action in the Cart.
Using selection overrides gives you greater control over your pricing strategies, allowing you to overcome common challenges and ensure that your customers always receive the correct Price, tailored to your business goals.
Different ways of handling special Prices
Leveraging Product Discounts for campaigns
Using Product Discounts for promotions and campaigns offers an additional advantage: the ability to track and analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns. The name of the Product Discount is included in the scopedPriceDiscounted field on the ProductVariant, making it available for use in reports and analytics. By naming or describing the Product Discount to include the relevant marketing campaign, you can easily track which campaigns are performing well.
This capability goes beyond tracking discounts. If you're monitoring the marketing impressions a customer has encountered, you can analyze the customer journey and measure campaign performance effectively by tagging campaigns through Product Discount names or descriptions. You can apply the same approach to Cart Discounts, giving you a consistent way to track the impact of various promotions across different pricing models.
You can use internal Product Discounts or External Discount Set to support this type of special Price.
Time-bound Prices as a workaround
A method to simulate special pricing is by leveraging time-bound Prices. By creating duplicate Prices for each time period, you can designate one as the "special Price" for a specific duration. This allows you to offer discounts or promotions temporarily without permanently altering the original Price. While this method works, it can become complex if you need to manage multiple time-bound Prices across different products or campaigns.
Using Custom Fields for original Prices
You can use Custom Fields to store the original Price of a Product. By setting a Custom Field with the original Price, you can adjust the actual Price field to reflect the current Price to be charged, whether it's a discounted Price or not. This approach keeps the original Price intact and accessible for reference, which can be useful for transparency and reporting.
Custom Fields for campaign tracking
In addition to using time-bound Prices as a workaround or Custom Fields for original Prices, you can set up Custom Fields to store campaign data directly within the pricing record. This provides another tracking layer, ensuring that every Price is related to the relevant marketing campaign. By systematically tagging and tracking these campaigns, you can gain deeper insights into which strategies drive sales and which might need adjustment.
Overcome challenges in large-scale systems
Managing pricing in large-scale enterprise systems presents unique challenges, especially when dealing with a vast number of Products, Variants, and Channels. It's essential to understand the limits of your system and explore solutions that maintain performance while ensuring flexibility.
The scale of the challenge
Consider our scenario with Electronics High Tech on the previous pages; 46,000 products, each with multiple Price points, distributed across hundreds of stores. Even if this product count is relatively low for an enterprise, managing over a million Prices can still be complex.
The complexity increases significantly if each store has the autonomy to set its own pricing for every product. With 46,000 products, three Prices per Product Variant, and 232 stores, the system could end up managing over 32 million Prices. This scale requires careful consideration of the system's capabilities.
Balancing flexibility and requirements
The key takeaway from managing enterprise-level systems is the importance of balancing system flexibility with business requirements. While it's crucial to push the limits of your platform to meet business needs, there are times when processes must adapt to the constraints of the system.
In some cases, businesses might need to implement workarounds or adjust their operations to fit within the capabilities of their commerce platform. This balance ensures that the system remains efficient and responsive, even as it scales to meet the demands of a growing enterprise.
By understanding and addressing these challenges, businesses can maintain high performance and flexibility, ensuring that their systems can effectively support growth and operational needs.