Pricing Groups Benefits & Capabilities

Pricing group eCommerce systems with complex and advanced pricing rules can cause major issues for a group purchasing organization. If the price isn’t accurate and doesn’t represent the correct rebates and quantity based or rule specific discounts, then the system doesn’t work as it should.

It all boils down to accuracy. Any information needs to be up to date. To do these, we recommend that you take a detailed look at how pricing works with your different vendors as you’re considering a buying group eCommerce system. Make sure to consider possible scenarios and if the marketplace software has the capability to deliver your needed functionalities.

Generally, the most common need is for a form of quantity-based discount, maybe even account specific pricing. Furthermore, you may need the ability to group items together whenever a purchase is being made, getting the buyer the biggest discount possible. While this sounds simple, it can be rather challenging for an application that wasn’t created with those capabilities in mind.

First, look into whether or not the system can handle complicated pricing rules. For example, a member may be able to get a better price than another customer based on how often they purchase, or maybe based on their group size, etc. They may also need to receive a rebate or get some form of rebate overtime calculated through the system. It's also possible that the group members may need to see a visual presentation, meaning the underlying data needs to be as accurate as possible.

There are many different business scenarios possible, and we strongly urge you to consider if the platform you’re considering allows your different software vendors to provide these functionalities, or if they would need to re-architect their system to meet your needs.

Price Points and Price Rules

Commonly, different systems will have different ways to set up pricing for each community buying group. One way to do this is to make what are called price points, which are essentially points at which the price gets reduced or discounted based on quantity or other factors. These points can be broken into account specific price point rules, allowing different accounts or even different types of accounts to have different rules applied to them. You can have points based on product type or even be broad across the board rules.

These types of components can be very complicated to get data on. Typically, the best way is to match the underlying pricing data to an internal ERP system that is already housing this information, or to leverage interactions with vendors either with a bulk Import or with a rule-based import of all the products from a particular vendor to match their price points.

There could be a lot of problems if this isn’t done correctly, so we encourage you to consider the level of fidelity your organization wishes to present. Then, consider the underlying data needed to show this image. It isn’t just about having price rules or prices logic in place. You need to keep the data up to date and synchronized, and maybe even pull information from your already existing systems. This could really benefit your organization, so consider a buying group platform, like Clarity, that has this capability.

In addition to quantity-based pricing rules, it’s also possible to set up even more specific rules based on certain criteria being met. Quantity could still be a factor, but you could also factor in the concept of buy one, get one free or other such discounts. Purchasing a lot of items can cause the fear of expensive shipping, but maybe once they purchase enough to fill up an entire truck there is a discount as it just a single truck picking up the items. Perhaps a customer is buying a new type of product for the first time and you wish to give them a discount incentive.

You can also have customer specific rules. This, alongside the previous capabilities discussed, can all be combined and leveraged; you will want to be as accurate as possible with pricing. We encourage you to consider this when evaluating a software platform. You want to get the most bang for your buck, all while getting the most capable system to meet your business needs long-term.

Whenever you are evaluating the best way to move forward, go through different transactions that have occurred over the course of the last several months or years. Ask your team to think about the different scenarios you may face, and determine how you would handle the more complicated ones. Will the system you’re thinking about purchasing be able to solve these issues? Think about how your platform will be impacted, and what capabilities you really need to serve for anticipated events.