Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity Ventures) gives a detailed example of how buying group multi-tiered pricing works.

Part 3 of a 6-part series (Return to Part 2)

RON: While we're on this screen where we're talking about the difference between multi-tiered pricing and pricing rules, let's walk through a couple of different examples of what that might be. So theoretically, the multi-tiered pricing would be something very simple, like I want to set a pricing level. 
 
What I'll do is, in in one of my buyers group platforms on my demo site, I'll just go in and I'll create a couple of different tiers here, and I'll just grab a quick screenshot so that you can see for, this particular product—and I don't know what it's going to be on the screen—but I'll take a particular product and we'll look at the price, and then we'll create three different tiers. We'll have one for wholesale resale and distributors.

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RON: You can see that the wholesale might be an uplift of whatever that percent is, right? So I might go out and do something like 15%, 25%, 35%, and then 40%. So retail uplift might be 40%. And then for a reseller, the uplift might be 30%. And then for a wholesaler it might be 20%, and then a distributor there might be 10%. 

Basically, it will look into your ERP—when we build a group buying platform, will typically integrate with the client's ERP—so as the cost of the product, as they buy it and purchase and the cost in the ERP, we'll take that literal cost and we'll uplift by those percentages. So the prices can adjust as your costs adjust that way. If the price goes up, then obviously your margin’s protected for each of those tiers. As the price goes down. If you want it to, it can be protected as well and give a better and more aggressive price. So as you benefit and get a lower price, your buyers group members get a lower price as well and you're always guaranteed your 10%, 20%, 30% margin, whatever that looks like. So that's setting different tiers.  

How that differs with pricing rules...pricing rules would be something like [this example]—Chris and I own a buying group platform and we were lucky enough to buy out Costco drugs when they went out of business. And so we have all this extra stuff in the warehouse and we want to clear it out. So what we're going to do is, we're going to go put everything with that tag and we're going to set a pricing rule that for the next 30 days, everything with this particular tag is an extra 20% off.  

Or we want to offer on Costco, we want to say, “Hey, it's getting close to back to school. So at Costco, we want to run a 20% off all kids clothing before two weeks before school starts.” So we would set a price rule. We would set it on kids clothing, and we would put a timing on that and say, for the next two weeks, all clothing in the kids clothing section is 20% off. That's a price rule, and that's very different than a price tier. And most of these, for the most part, are auto-applied.

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RON: That is a little bit different than typical promotions and or discounts. So within our buyers group platform—and I might bring in another screenshot here—where you can see we have a toggle as to whether or not, when we go create a discount code, whether that discount is auto-applied or not, you want to do auto-applied things like once the cart hits 500 bucks, shipping is automatically free. 
 
They don't want to have to try to remember that and to type in a code, right? So that would be an auto-apply discount to the cart. Another auto-applied discount or promotion might be the BOGO, right? Buy one, get one free. As you can see here—and I'll put it on the screen—is buy X, get Y. So I could say, “Hey, if you buy two bags of salt for your pool, you can get three pool toys for free.” They can be completely disparate, not related, different things like that.

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RON: So those would be promotions, discounts, pricing rules and pricing tiers. They're all very different. But all of those strategies are things that, when you start up front on your eCommerce group platform, [you should] sit down, talk about the strategy, and figure out where you think you might want to go and the things you might want to do. It's always easier to implement upfront and slowly add things in than to put it in, have something wrong, and then try to back those expectations out after your users are already used to using the site and some of them like that. And then you realize you made a mistake. It is so hard to back those out.  

So, sit down with your custom eCommerce development consultant upfront, talk through all the different scenarios, figure out truly how flexible and customizable their platform is, write down all the different options, and then you can take that back to the business team and talk about all the different things you may want to do to help improve sales, increase sales, increase retention, loyalty, all of those different things. Then come back and make sure that the strategies that make sense for you are all things that are on the table and available to you.  

Continue to Part 4 to learn how to calculate prices for buyers groups.