Trade Customers, Trade Pricing and Price Plans

The following are the options for setting up trade customers and/or using advanced pricing features:

Trade Customers

You can update a customer's status to being a Trade Customer which will allow you give them additional privileges which are explained in this article and the other B2B articles.

Click here to find out how to set up a trade customer

Trade Pricing

When updating a product, you can also set a trade price as well as a regular price using this screen:

This TRADE price is ignored unless you configure your website to use the trade price - the following are the options available for using the trade prices (contact the Help Desk to turn these on):

• Only show trade prices to trade customers
• OR Show trade prices to all customers (and effectively ignore the regular pricing completely)

Note also that there is a Trade Promotion Price field in the screen above which you can also set to show a "Was-Now" price to trade customers.

Overall Price Discounts

When updating a trade customer, under the TRADE tab, you will see an Overall Price Discount Percentage which allows you give a customer a discount across all products on the website except products which have Discounts Disallowed under the following Update Product screen (under the PRICING & PROMOTIONS tab and under ADVANCED SETTINGS).

Ensure that you exclude products like gift vouchers from getting overall price discounts.

Note that when this setting is used for a client, the client cannot use any promo codes during the checkout.

Update Trade Customer Screen - e.g. give 5% off all products:

Update Product Screen:

Specifying Specific Categories for Global Discounts

If you would like only certain categories of products from getting a global discount, contact the Help Desk and give them a list of Primary Category code numbers for the categories (and their sub-categories) that you want global discounts to apply against.

Price Plans

A more advanced pricing configuration is to use price plans.  A price plan is a group of products that have a specific price.

Creating and Updating Price Plans

To create or update a price plan:

• Log in as web admin and click Catalogue - Price Plans.
• Click Add New Price Plan to create a new price plan - you can then set the price plan's currency, a unique code for it, and it's title.
• Click Update beside a price plan to update it.
• To add products and specific pricing, click View Prices beside a price plan:
  • Click Add New Price to add one or more products and a specific price - for multiple products, just separate the product codes with commas.
  • You can also delete prices from the price plan (to update a price, just delete it and then re-add it with the new price).

A customer can be assigned to 1 or more price plans which allows you give difference customers their own pricing.

The following features are available for price plans:

• Currency Base Price Plans - you can set a price plan against a specific currency which effectively overrides the regular pricing/trade pricing described above for that currency.
  • Note that without price plans, you set a regular/trade price for your base currency and if you have other currencies turned on, they are calculated using their currency exchange rate.  When using price plans for currencies, this overrides the default algorithm and allows you set specific prices for specific currencies.
  • If you use price plans for trade customers (described below) but don't set a base price plan, the regular/trade pricing will be used as their base price for products.
  • To set up a base price plan for a specific currency, contact the Help Desk for advice on how to do this.
• Trade Customer Specific Price Plans - on top of the base price plan above, you can assign price plans to specific customers as follows.  When updating a customer, under the TRADE tab, you will see the following options:
  • Default Currency - You can set the currency that the customer uses when they log in
  • 2 Levels of Price Plans - You can assign a customer up to 2 levels of price plans:
    
    • Base Price Plan - if you would like to assign them to a base price plan that you are assigning to a group of customers.
    • Special Price Plan - if on top of the base price plan, you want to set specific prices for that customer, you can assign them to a special price plan too - note that the price in this plan overrides the base price plan even if it's higher.
• Trade Customer UNLIMITED Specific Price Plans
  • This is similar to the Base and Special price plans above but allows the customer be assigned to as many price plans as you want.  in this case, the customer is given the lowest price across all price plans.
  • You can set up price plans using the AUTOMATED SYSTEMS INTEGRATION module and using the following integrations:
    • Price Plans Systems Integration
    • Customer Price Plans Systems Integration
  • Or if you want to do this manually, click View Prices Plans beside a customer under the Accounts - Trade Customers menu bar.
    • You can add one or more price plans to that account.
    • When adding, updating a price plan for a customer, you have the option to check the Apply Discount checkbox and enter a discount for that customer based on the prices in the price plan.  For example, you may want to have a price plan with special pricing for your trade customers and then give certain customers 5% off the prices in this price plan, and other customers 10% or 15%.  And you could do this for multiple price plans across different categories of products as different customers may specialise in specific groups of products that you want to give them a larger discount on.

Price Plans stored in Cache

All price plans are stored in the web server's cache so any changes made to them may take up to 30 minutes to be live on the website (unless you manually clear the cache).

Price Plans & Hosting

Each trade customer and price plan combination takes up separate memory on our web server's cache.

If you have a small number of trade customers and a small number of price plans, this is included in our standard hosting plan, but if you want to have a large number of trade customers and a large number of price plans, you may need to upgrade to a higher hosting plan at a higher cost.  Please contact the Help Desk for more information.

Pricing Algorithm Hierarchy

The following details the steps the pricing algorithm takes when deciding which price / promotion price to use:

1. Client Price Plans: We look at the client price plans which are the client base price plan + special price plan, and the account price plans.
   1. If the product is found on any of these price plans, then this is the price that is used (no promotions or other prices are looked at) - the only exception is when you use price plans which are made up of a % discount off the base price, in which the base price plan/regular/trade price is then used for this calculation)
   2. The price used is the lowest price unless the price is in the SPECIAL PRICE PLAN for the customer where this price is used even if the other price plans have a lower price
2. Client Overall Discount: If no CLIENT price plans are used, but an overall discount was set for the client, this is then used.  Except if the product has Discounts Disallowed checked which will exclude the product from this discount.
3. Base Price Plan for current currency: If you configure a BASE PRICE PLAN for the current currency, then this is used.
   • Regular/Trade Price / Promotion Price: Alternatively, the user will use the product level price including promotion price/discount OR the trade price depending on your configuration
   • Note that if you have a base price plan configured, and the product is not in that base price plan, then the price will be zero (i.e. it does not then look at the Regular/Trade price)
4. Promotions: If no CLIENT PRICE PLANS or OVERALL DISCOUNT are used, we then check for promotions against the products.