How a custom solution can allow pricing scenarios to fit your business Pricing flexibility is crucial to providing a great digital experience to business-to-business B2B customers In continuing our series of posts about the advantages custom eCommerce implementations offer for B2B, this week we are focusing on pricing. Most B2B businesses have specific relationships with existing customers that require variable pricing for specific products. Many of you will have additional specific scenarios that impact prices for various reasons. This logic can be straightforward or complicated, but may not be supported by an off-the-shelf eCommerce platform either way. Custom pricing goes hand in hand with other custom options like custom purchasing and ordering to ensure that you get the most out of your eCommerce implementation. Clarity's Logic When dealing with multiple pricing scenarios, Clarity eCommerce is flexible enough to accommodate any required or feasible logic. Default pricing will be set for all items to display to any regular visitor to the site, or you can require visitors to create a login before they are able to see any pricing. When they first create their account you can display this default pricing, and variations can be attributed as the relationship progresses. Customer-specific pricing can be managed easily by assigning accounts account classifications, typically in your ERP but this can also be done in Clarity eCommerce if it is preferred. You can configure any number of account classes to fit all of your customer scenarios. Typically in your ERP the field for defining this will be either “customer class” or “customer price class”, but with your integration, you will be able to configure this push/pull relationship however you’d like. You can also set pricing specific to one individual account if it does not fit an existing class. In a custom solution like Clarity’s, you have total control over what pricing is shown to what accounts. This gives you a great deal of flexibility when it comes to maintaining a personal relationship with customers. It also ensures that returning customers aren’t thrown off by prices that differ from the ones they are used to getting. Determining Your Pricing Research shows that pricing has a powerful impact on profits. This might seem obvious, but many B2B businesses don't actually realize how much flexibility they have with regard to pricing. ECommerce with flexible pricing capabilities provides an opportunity for experimentation, and we really encourage playing with pricing and seeing what works best for your bottom line. Pricing has been shown to impact profits more than market share or reducing costs, but most likely your business dedicates more budget and resources to the latter two than to improving pricing. Pricing strategy has two main components: price setting and price getting. Price setting involves structuring and defining the target prices you would like to realize and planning the discounts that will be involved. Price getting is the account-by-account or sale-by-sale strategy that aims to realize the pricing that has been set, and lies oftentimes with your sales team and then is translated to the customer’s interactions with eCommerce. Brick Packaging For Brick Packaging, Clarity has built-in multi-tiered pricing with a triple cart system. The three carts allow users to add items to the appropriate cart depending on if they are looking to check out and purchase the items, create a quote, or to create a sample cart. The key to multi-tiered pricing for Brick is that the system allows for quantity breaks to be set in their Microsoft Dynamics GP ERP system. Discounts for ordering large quantities are crucial to Brick’s business, and very common to other B2B businesses. Brick also uses customer-specific pricing, brought into the eCommerce system from their existing pricing information defined on an account-by-account basis in their ERP. Bringing existing pricing into the new site is a big help in maintaining comfort as the customer engages with Brick’s new eCommerce capabilities. Returning customers can easily re-order items online without ever needing to engage directly with a Brick employee. Clarity Can Help ECommerce represents an enormous opportunity for B2B businesses. Custom implementations—including taking advantage of the benefits of B2B mobile apps—that allow for any number of pricing scenarios help you run your business the best way you know how, and the way your customers have come to expect, while also offering new purchasing methods that will save you and your customers time. Pricing flexibility can help you improve your bottom line, and Clarity has the technology you need to provide a great digital experience, as well as the expertise required to implement that technology. Contact us today to set up a free demo. We’re looking forward to showing you what we can do.