ChannelEngine: price rules v2

About this article

This article describes price rules on ChannelEngine.

Table of contents

Introduction

Requirements

Map price fields 

Create a price rule

Additional features

Marketplace-specific price fields

FAQs

Introduction

ChannelEngine offers control over your pricing, allowing you to easily set and adjust prices to match the use cases of individual channels, with price rules.

Using price rules, systematically adjust your products' prices to meet every pricing use case on the channel, factoring in shipping, fees, sales tax, currency conversions, and commission, so that you always know what ends up in your account after the sale. 

Requirements

Pricing v2 is required to use this feature. Pricing v1 will be deprecated soon. If you currently use pricing v1, activate pricing v2 before you continue:

1. In the Pricing step of a given channel, click Configuration mode to start configuring pricing v2 while pricing v1 stays active.
2. When you are ready to fully switch to pricing v2, reach out to the Support team to activate pricing v2 on the respective channel(s).

Overview

To manage the price rules for a specific channel, go to the Pricing step of the given channel and select the Price rules tab.

Price rules displays the set of price attributes that the channel expects in your offers, both required and optional, as a set of tabs. These tabs are your channel price attributes; the names of these tabs may match the names of the same attributes that you mapped in Mappings. These attributes differ per channel, depending on the supported sales and fulfillment models, e.g.: marketplace or merchant fulfillment, business-to-business sales, and volume discounts.

In each tab, configure the Min. price and Base price fields, at a minimum. Check out the next section on Price fields for details on all the available price fields to configure.  

Map price fields

In the left section of each tab, configure your Price fields, the standard price attributes that ChannelEngine uses to export your offers. All price rules that you define hereafter are based on the price fields. Map the following price fields:

• Base price - required; the product’s regular price for the selected attribute. This is the price at which you would normally sell your product, before discounts.
• Min. price - required; the minimum value for the given price attribute. This is the minimum price at which you sell the product and are still profitable. If using repricing, it is the lower boundary of the given price attribute. When setting up additional price rules, the exported price does not fall below this price unless you set up promotions to fall below your minimum price. (See the note on promotions in the section A guide to the price fields below.)
• Min. commercial price - the product’s minimum commercial price for the selected channel attribute. This is the minimum price defined by the brand, supplier, or manufacturer.
• Max. price - the product’s maximum price for the selected channel attribute. This is the maximum price at which you can sell the product and still be competitive.
• Max. commercial price - the product’s maximum commercial price for the selected channel attribute. This is the maximum price defined by the brand, supplier, or manufacturer.
• Price link - a link to an existing price attribute that you mapped on another (sales) channel. Check out the Price link section below for more details.
• Max. bound -  (select channels) the product’s maximum price boundary as dictated by the channel.
• Min. bound - (select channels) the product’s minimum price boundary as dictated by the channel. 

Price link 

The price link is the link to an existing exported price (before repricing) from another channel or the same channel in a different country. If you add a price link to a channel that supports repricing, the mapped price from the source channel is used, not the repricer-suggested price. 

If the source channel applies a promotion price to a product, the promotion price is exported to the target channel. Be aware that the price link simply allows using the final price of the source channel and does not adjust the VAT or commissions of the target channel, nor does it do currency conversions. E.g.: if you grab the price from Amazon NL, e.g.: 20 EUR, and link it to Allegro PL, VAT amounts or marketplace commissions are not adjusted, and the applied value is 20. To convert the price to a different currency, e.g.: PLN, or include the corresponding Allegro marketplace fees, apply a price rule afterwards. 

To gain hands-on experience with the price link feature, check out the microlearning ChannelEngine: price link.

A guide to the price fields

Here is additional guidance on how to choose which price fields to configure:

• Among all of your minimum prices (Min. price, Min. commercial price), the highest value is considered your final minimum price. 
• Among your maximum prices (Max. bound, Max. price, Max. commercial price), the lowest value is considered your final maximum price.
• ChannelEngine uses all the provided price field inputs to calculate the exported price. Importantly, it ensures that the exported price value does not go above the maximum price or below the minimum price. This creates a safety net for you in case you apply incorrect price rules to your Base price.
  The only exception to the above rule is when you indicate that the promotion price can go below the minimum price in the Offer mappings. To learn more about how to set up promotion prices to go below your minimum price, check out the article ChannelEngine: promotions.
• If you use the Price link as a price field, the price link value overrides Base price. However, if the value in the Price link field is below your minimum price, the minimum price is used instead.
• If the Price link field has no value, ChannelEngine automatically uses Base price as a fallback price.

Price field input 

The Price field input is the input for the price field. Choose from the list of fields that you use to manage your product data ChannelEngine, including ChannelEngine fields and your custom fields. Your Price input field is the price value before any other rules you create are applied.

The options in the Price field input dropdown are ChannelEngine fields and custom fields that you store on ChannelEngine, i.e.: imported from your merchant system or product feed. Use these fields to map your Price fields and as input to your price rules. E.g.: use the Catalog price as price field input for Base price and build up the price using price rules, by adding shipping costs and VAT rate on top.

In contrast, the Price fields specify the minimum, maximum, and regular selling prices to use in calculating the exported price within your specified range. 

In summary:

• Price fields are the ChannelEngine fields that you need to set up for the channel.
• Price field input is the actual value you provide for each Price field – the data from your own system.

Create a price rule

Price rules enable you to build up your price from cost price, factoring in shipping, fees, VAT, and commission, so you always know what ends up in your account after the sale.

• Add Commission + VAT is a dedicated rule type that factors in fees and tax automatically.
• Fee groups allow accurate commission calculation per product category.
• Min. price acts as your profitability floor, and the system never exports below it.
• Min. and Max. commercial price lets brand or supplier guidelines protect your pricing.

Worked example: building a price from cost up

Configure one or multiple rules and apply them to your Price field input. The price rules allow you to add or subtract a certain amount or percentage of the price, round up or down the price, add marketplace commission and VAT to it, and do a currency conversion.

Apply price rules on two levels:

• All products - default; applies to all products on the channel.
• Product selection - applies to a specific product selection on the channel.

Rules for all products

To add a price rule to all products on the channel:

1. In the Price rules section, click Add rule.
   
2. From the Price rule type dropdown, select the desired price rule type. Options are:
   • Add fixed amount - the fixed amount you want to add to or subtract from the input price. To subtract, add a minus before the value. E.g.: -4.85. Use a period as the decimal separator.
   • Add percentage - the percentage you want to add to or subtract from the input price. To subtract, add a minus before the value. E.g.: -20.
   • Add commission and VAT - the commission and sales tax you want to add to the input price. Ensure your marketplace commission and VAT settings are correctly configured on ChannelEngine. To learn more, check out the articles ChannelEngine: marketplace fees and ChannelEngine: VAT settings.
   • Use field - used to introduce a different field. You can add to, subtract from, multiply, or divide by this field. E.g.: add shipping costs or inventory fees.
   • Rounding - used to round the output of a price rule to a commercially friendly value. E.g.: by using Round UP to the nearest .99, you change a price of EUR 19.84 to EUR 19.99.

   • Currency conversion - used to convert your default currency to the currency of a marketplace or the country-based currency of a marketplace. The exchange rates for all currencies are retrieved once a day from the European Central Bank (ECB).

     NB: if you plan to use Add commission and VAT and Currency conversion rules simultaneously, ensure that currency conversion is performed first. This way, VAT and commission are calculated using the correct currency.
3. Provide a suitable name for the price rule, and click Save.

Keep in mind that:

• If you use multiple rules, the order does change the result. Rule 1 is applied first, followed by rule 2, then rule 3, etc. To change the order of the rules, drag and drop them using the six-square icon.

Rules for a product selection

To apply rules to a specific product selection:

1. In the Product selection price overrides section, select Add product selection.
2. Select your product selection. 
3. Follow the same steps as for creating price rules for all products.

Creating a product selection override can be useful when products have different pricing strategies. E.g.: one group of products may have a significantly different profit margin, or their production and shipping costs might be much higher than those of others. In this situation, first create a product selection that fits your needs, such as grouping products by brand, package size, or price, and then create a product selection price override to factor in price differences.

Keep in mind that:

• It is not recommended to add the same product to multiple product selections. If you use a product selection override, then that price is exported even if it is lower.

Additional features

Export calculated prices

To check the calculated prices according to your price rules, promotions, and repricer suggestions, click the Export calculated prices button on the right. This exports a CSV file to your login email address. The CSV file provides an overview of all price values, along with the final calculated price, so that you can check the correctness of your setup.

Price rule example

To see how the price rules you set up are applied to products, click the Price rule example button on the right. This opens a modal.

ChannelEngine randomly selects a product to show the applied price rules. To view the price rules for a specific product, enter its name or Merchant product number in the search bar.

In the Show as in section, choose whether to view the price rules at the default level or the product selection level.

In the example above, the price rules for Min. price are applied as follows:

1. The value of the Purchase price field is taken as the input, i.e.: 288.6.
2. It is increased by the given percentage, i.e.: 288.6 + 288.6*0.15 = 331.89.
3. It is then increased by a fixed amount, i.e.: 321.89 + 10 = 341.89
4. The commission and VAT are added on top. ChannelEngine applies a sophisticated calculation mechanism, which factors in the product’s marketplace fee and checks whether it is fixed, variable,  or both, and the configured sales tax calculation.
5. The final value is rounded up to the nearest 99 cents, i.e. 460.77 → 460.99

Marketplace-specific price fields

bol

On bol, Max. bound and Min. bound are tied to price stars. Price stars reflect how competitive your pricing is compared to similar offers. The rating ranges from 1 star (above the acceptable price point) to 5 stars (highly competitive). To see the price star assigned to a product, click the Offer tab on the Listed products page, and check the Price column. Note that not all products get a price star from bol due to the lack of competition data. In the Min. bound and Max. bound price fields, you can select a star rating, which ChannelEngine uses as your minimum or maximum threshold. This way, you make sure that your product's price stays within bol's defined price range for that star rating and remains competitive. To learn more about price stars, check out the article bol: marketplace guide.

Amazon

On Amazon, Max. bound is tied to the competitive price threshold. This is the maximum price at which a product remains eligible for the buy box. Prices above this threshold are considered uncompetitive and may be excluded – unless the offer gets significant customer engagement (i.e.: many clicks). Map this field to Competitive price threshold to make sure that your product's price stays within Amazon's defined price threshold and remains competitive.

FAQs

What price is exported if I enable pricing v2 without mapping prices?
If you do not map a price, your product fails marketplace validation. As a result, your product cannot be exported or updated.

Can I create multiple currency conversions?
You can only create one currency conversion within a price rule – from your default currency to a new currency. E.g.: if your default currency is EUR, you can set a currency conversion to PLN. However, further converting that to a different currency is not possible because the starting point is always your default currency.