What is the best way to set up special pricing for particular customers?

We currently use IC/Edit Item/Pricing/A,B,C,D,E to set the discounts for particular groups of customers. For example, a particular buying group are all set to customer type A and therefore get discounts on the items set up with a discount amount set in A in IC/Edit Item/Pricing/A. This works for up to 5 buying groups (A,B,C,D,E).

How can I also set up personalized pricing for other customers? For example, Joe's Store has an agreement with us to buy his widgets at a $15 instead of the regular price of $20. Sally's Store buys another item at $20 instead of $25, etc. We have dozens of individual scenarios like this. Everything else these customers buy at our regular price. Regular pricing changes daily as new product is always coming in at new prices.

So I want to set something up so these customers will get their special pricing on the few items we've agreed up, but regular pricing otherwise.

We've never used IC's alternate price lists so I'm not sure if that can help us. Can someone steer me in the right direction?

You have 2 choices, and you may want to discuss with your Adagio consultant to determine if either work well for you.

One choice is the Alternative Price List items that you mentioned. This allows you to create additional pricing schemes with a separate list of base price and A-E customer pricing, identical to what you currently use for pricing from the master IC items.

You can create (essentially) unlimited numbers of alternate prices for each item. You may choose to create a Price List code for general blocks of customers, or create a separate Price List for every customer (ie create a price list code for each customer if desired). You don't have to create alternate price list items for every item for every customer, just those that are different from the master pricing you currently have set up.

Alternate Price Lists work better in high-volume sites with lots of item SKUs because you can export/import the alternate prices for easier maintenance.

The other choice is Special Prices that are defined in Order Entry. A record is created for a customer to give a particular price for a specific item or any item within a specific category. You can assign a particular price, a particular A-E customer price (either from the master list or from an alternative price list) or a particular amount or percentage discount (or markup, if the item uses markups instead of discounts).

These special prices cannot be imported so they can be a little harder to maintain if there are a lot of them. One big advantage is that OE 81C has an option to 'Always use special price', so when a customer orders the item, they will always get the special price regardless if the item is on sale or another price may be lower.

If you always want to ensure that Joe buys the widget for $15 and Sally buys it for $20, you can use either method. OE Special Prices may be the better way to go, because Alternate Price List items are always a Discount on base price (or Markup over the markup cost) and if the calculated price was less then the agreed-to price, that calculated price would be the default. But the choice is up to you.

Hi Susan

To add my two cents worth..

The fact that Special Prices can't be imported makes them so hard to maintain that I strongly recommend you avoid them.


The only instance where I have found Special Prices to be useful is if you want to discount by item category. In all other cases I recommend using Alternative Price Lists.

Steve

I completely forgot that OE/Special Prices existed. I'm pretty sure this will work quite well for what we're looking for.

I tested Alternative Price Lists as well to compare and I think it could also work. I notice that it defaults to the regular base price when there is no specified price in Alternative Price List. The only problem is that it gives us an error in OE every time we add an item that says, "Item was not found in the price list. Pricing will default from the base price list". Is there a way to disable this message?

Yes. In the company profile.

I looked through both OE and IC Company Profile but didn't see a setting to stop the alert.

The option is called 'Use base price list if not found' on the OE profile System Options tab. You currently have this option enabled. What this does is if you have not defined an item on an Alternative Price List, you either get the alert (as what you are getting) or an error that the item does not belong on the Price List and you cannot add the item to the order until you first add the item to the Price List.

To avoid the alert, you have to set up every item on every price list. Then create/edit the alternate price list items that will be different. It won't matter what setting you have in teh company profile because every item will exist on the price list and thus never have to revert to the master price list.

It is not possible to create just the 'exceptions' to the master pricing and not get the alert that if the alternate price list item doesn't exist then the pricing comes from the main list. There is no option to just 'disable the alert'.

Special Prices it is then! There is no reasonable way for us to maintain multiple price lists for the purposes of a few exceptions. Thanks for all the info.