Assigning a price list and pricing rules to a seller or region

A price list and pricing rules can be assigned based on seller region as well as on customer region.

Seller-based and region-based pricing provides options to structure price lists based on regional factors, competitive factors, or a flexible combination of both. Large enterprises can define pricing and promotion according to geographical considerations as well as local competition. Within a hierarchy, sellers can maintain single-seller price lists and pricing rules, or sellers can be grouped together based on their business needs. Prices defined at the corporate level can be overridden at the region or seller level.

For example, a list price for a computer printer may be set at the corporate level at $119.95. However, in a highly competitive region, a seller might want to define the price as $99.95 for that particular seller. The same might be true for promotions and markdowns. In this way, prices in environments where there is intense competition can be set at a different level from prices where there is relatively little competition, with other prices in between.

While only pricing organization users are usually allowed to create pricelists, an exception allows a seller user to create a pricelist. The seller user might create a pricelist with a list of items that is applicable only to that particular seller.

You can model seller price lists and pricing rules in various ways:
  • Corporate defines price lists and pricing rules for sellers to use.
  • Sellers define price lists and pricing rules.
  • Corporate defines and assigns price lists and pricing rules to a specific seller, to a group or region of sellers, or all sellers.
  • Seller-specific price lists and pricing rules can be defined for all customers.

If you are upgrading Sterling™ Order Management System Software and have existing price lists that do not have a seller assignment, an optional upgrade step creates them for you. After seller assignments are created, you can change the value of a property so that the system looks only for those pricelists that have defined, at a minimum, a seller assignment.

A price list can have customer assignments, seller assignments, or both. If multiple price lists exist and they are based on seller assignment and customer assignments, then the price selection is based on the configuration rule “Pricing strategy based on assignment.” Precedence for these assignments is described in Configuring precedence.

For information about configuring and administering price lists and pricing rules, see the Sterling Business Center Pricing Administration topics on the Sterling Order Management System Information Center.

Seller assignments

Prices from seller assignments are considered in the following order, based on the price list line whose price list or lists are:
  1. Created by a specific seller.
  2. Assigned to that specific seller.
  3. Assigned to a seller's attributes. Assignment with maximum number of matching attributes will be picked from all the matching pricelist assignments
  4. Assigned to the seller's region. Region is considered one of the seller attribute. Because the region definition is hierarchical, the most specific region is used when the item is priced. If the price is not found in the price list for the most specific region, the search for a price continues up the region hierarchy.
  5. Assigned to all sellers from corporate.
    Note: If more than one price list line exists at each step, then the lowest price among the price lists is used.