Pricing and cost attributes

The pricing and cost attributes are typically managed by the pricing and merchandising system. However, you might import certain attributes into the Product Master Server system by external feeds.

These attributes might not change frequently but serve as inputs to the pricing engine.

Examples of pricing and cost attributes are:
  • Initial price
  • Initial cost
  • Minimum advertised price
  • Vendor cost

Best practices

  • Treat IBM® Product Master as an enabler for pricing system.
  • Do not store the current price of an item in a Product Master Server system. Users can view the current price in the pricing and merchandising systems. Maintaining the value in the Product Master Server system and keeping in sync requires unnecessary overhead and increases the Service Level Agreement (SLA) or performance requirements.
  • Create the current price attribute as read-only and expose the interface to update these values from the pricing engine only if the client requires the current and promotion price to be made visible in Product Master Server.
  • Product Master can show these prices and export them as needed. Schedule the data exchange to occur on a periodic basis.
  • Do not impose any real-time requirements.
  • Do not store the history of price and cost changes in Product Master preferably.