Pricing add-on

The Pricing Service provides the ability to store and maintain all the pricing data at the Pricing Organization. An organization can be defined as a Pricing Organization and maintain its own pricing data, or an organization can specify a Pricing Organization of its choice.

Support for pricing in Sterling™ Order Management System requires additional licensing as an Add-On solution. The Pricing Service enables you to define price lists, maintain prices for each product, define quantity tiers, and assign price lists either directly to customers or indirectly to customer attributes. The Pricing Service uses price lists, pricing rules, and customer assignments to manage customer access to products and appropriate prices.

This module includes two distinct functionalities. The ability to model the price of an item, Pricelists, and the ability to model promotions for items and orders, Promotions.

Price lists

Pricelists are used to model unit price. Price can be defined as base unit price, at quantity tier level with additional flexibility to apply adjustments to the base unit price. Pricelists can be assigned to specific customers, for a region, or for a specific group of stores. A price list is a list that defines pricing for specific items or SKUs. It consists of header information and a list of products and their list prices. The header contains information such as the name, description, currency, effectivity dates, and status of the price list.

The price list lines associate products with a list price and show either positive or negative adjustments. Each price list line has zero or more quantity tiers, and each tier can have its own list price. Each price list line also has zero or more effectivity date tiers and each tier can have its own price.

A price list can be inherited from a master price list, and additional percentage adjustments or absolute adjustments can be defined for the child price list. Pricelists can be assigned to specific customers, customer profiles, or for a region, for a specific group of individual stores, or for a group of stores based on profile(s). Pricing lists can be administered through the Sterling Business Center application.

Promotions

Promotions are modeled as pricing rules and can be defined for a store, an entire system, a particular customer, and so on. Promotions can be modeled as:

Pricing rules: Used to model automatic promotions your business is running such as Buy one get one free, free shipping on category of items. These promotions are applied automatically to an order when it meets a certain criteria.

Coupons: Used to model scenarios such as vendor and manufacturer coupons. These are applied when a particular coupon ID is applied to an order and that order meets the criteria defined for the coupon.

Non-instant pricing rules: Used to model scenarios such as store rewards, cash back, mail in rebates. These promotions are applied automatically to an order when it meets a certain criteria. They are associated with a non-billable charge name so that they do not impact actual order total, but can be used for further processing.

In addition to managing prices for products by using price lists, you can manage prices by using pricing rules and coupons. Pricing rules and coupons manage special offers, discounts, and charges at either the order level or the line level. A pricing rule defines a set of conditions and actions. When the condition of a rule is satisfied, the corresponding action is taken. A rich variety of conditions can be defined. For example, you can create coupons based on the category of an item, a minimum amount paid by the customer, the quantity of items purchased, or other attributes. Moreover, by using pricing rules, you can create a promotion that applies to a category of items, such as electronics, where brand X is the featured brand of the promotion. Additionally, pricing rules can be assigned to specific customers, customer profiles, regions, specific stores, or groups of stores that are based on profiles. Pricing rules and coupons can be administered through the Sterling Business Center application.

Manual adjustments

The Pricing Service enables a Field Sales Representative (CPQ) or a Customer Service Representative (OM) to manually adjust the price of a line total or an order total during the creation or modification of an order. The adjustment can be a discount or an additional charge.

For example:

In a quote scenario, a Field Sales Representative or a CSR can manually add a discount to a line, based on the negotiation between the buyer and the seller.
If a customer is not satisfied, or has had a bad experience with any of the services that are provided, a Field Sales Representative or a CSR can appease the customer by manually applying a discount to the order total.

Surcharges

Sterling Order Management System enables you to add shipping surcharges to items that have a specific set of features you define. For example, an organization can charge an additional amount of $20 as surcharge to ship items that require refrigeration.

Manual pricing rules

Manual pricing rules enable you to perform price adjustments for a quote along a single or multiple lines, including the price of the components in a bundle item in a quote. A manual pricing rule can be set to be effective in defined date ranges and to be called when certain conditions are met. A manual pricing rule is characterized by conditions and effects. When a condition pertaining to a manual pricing rule is satisfied, the corresponding effect is applied to the corresponding quote’s price. There are various price adjustments that a customer sales representative can apply to the price of an entire quote, a line item or an option in the quote. For example a dealer can give the factory discount, marketing discount, and special pricing discount on an item. Manual pricing rules can thus be applied to a quote as required.