Overview of pricing service
The Pricing Service is a component of IBM® Sterling™ Order Management System. It acts as a hub for every pricing and promotion calculation that occurs in Sterling Order Management SystemTM. Even if pricing data is passed to a third party, the data is funneled back through the Pricing Service before being passed to the consuming application.
The Pricing Service provides the ability to store and maintain all the pricing and promotions data at the Pricing Organization. Promotions are defined using pricing rules. Either 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.
The Pricing Service enables users to define price lists, maintain prices for each product, define quantity tiers, define various promotions such as item, order or shipping promotions, and assign price lists and promotions either directly to customers or indirectly to customer attributes. It can assign price lists and promotions to sellers directly based on region or any other grouping attribute of the seller.
For example, a Pricing Organization can define prices based on criteria such as the quantity of items ordered, the importance of the customer, the region or seller where the item is sold, and the time period during which the item is sold. Price lists and pricing rules are defined and managed by the Pricing Organization. The assignment of price lists or pricing rules to customers, customer profile based on customer attributes, or seller assignment is managed by the Enterprise.
Administering pricing
Using the pricing administration feature of IBM Sterling Business Center, you can perform pricing-related tasks such as creating and managing price lists, pricing rules, and coupons that pertain to a pricing organization. Additionally, you can test that prices of the items will be calculated correctly when they are added to an order after configuring the price lists, pricing rules, and coupons. A price list is a list of prices defined for a set of items. Promotions are configured as pricing rules and coupons, and are used to perform pricing adjustments to an order. However, these adjustments will be effective only if certain conditions are satisfied. While a pricing rule automatically impacts an order price, a coupon must be manually added to an order for it to affect the order price.
For example, if you want to offer computer products at lesser prices to a special customer, XYZ, you can create a price list, add the items to the price list, define the appropriate prices for these items, and assign the price list to XYZ. If you want to attract customers by providing promotional offers such as giving away an inexpensive item for free when another item is purchased, or providing a discount on the total amount charged to the customer based on the order total, you can create either pricing rules or coupons to perform such price adjustments to the order.
- When entering values in an ID field, such as Category ID, it is recommended that you use alpha-numeric characters in English, and standard symbols for other languages. You must avoid use of special characters in an ID field. For a complete list of special characters that you must not use in an ID field, contact your system administrator.
- Your administrator may have set certain validation rules for the data that is entered in the user interface. As a result, you may not be able to enter few characters in the user interface. If the data entered by you does not pass the validation, a descriptive error message is displayed indicating the reason for the validation failure. Contact your administrator for more details on the validations defined.
- In this Release, we are integrating the commerce solutions by Sterling Commerce® and IBM. That is, the Sterling Order Management System solutions are being integrated with the Websphere Commerce solutions. If the enterprise chooses to use Websphere Commerce Pricing, the users of the enterprise should not be assigned with Pricing Administrator User group. This feature provides the flexibility for each enterprise in any deployment to decide on the source of pricing and accordingly have access to Sterling Business Center Pricing module.
- The terms pricing rules and promotions are synonymous.
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