A pricing feature found in just about all eCommerce platforms of any worth these days is the ability to set some form of custom pricing for individual customers. There are a number of ways this could be approached but essentially what would be sought is:
The ability to offer ‘selected’ customers special pricing on certain products that is outside of RRP or wholesale prices.
To be able to readily update the customer price list via import/export so as to provide efficient price list management
Business Catalyst had an approach whereby for each customer you could set a discount rate on selected catalogues. This worked very well but not necessarily the ideal solution. Other approaches that could be considered might include:
Having multiple price lists where the price is physically set for each product basically being a duplicate of the base price
Setting up different ‘classes’ of customers which defined the price, discount % or Discount$ on products by catalogue and customers are assigned to one of the customer classes.
All the above would work only where the customer has logged into the website and is thus assigned to a secure zone (this in fact could be the basis of the customer classes referred to above).
Has anyone else had such a need and how did you resolve your own situation?
Does anyone else feel there is a case for arguing that this be a feature of Treepl eCommerce / CRM/ Secure Zones and what suggestions would you have?
Yes, I totally agree that this ability is needed. The only existing method I know of to achieve a similar result is to hide and pre-populate the discount code field with one of numerous pre-set codes applied conditionally based on logged in status plus a unique identifier or SZ to assign/populate the applicable code. The big limitation with this is the discount is calculated from the cart total. So it’s a universal discount rather than having any custom control at the product level.
@TopLeftDesigns I agree with @on.works, the only method is to “use” the discount code field in the shopping cart. I did that in a project in which the clients wants numerous discounts to be applied in different scenarios - like an early bird discount, group discounts and discounts based on the customer’s status. What I do to achieve this is quite complex liquid code on the shopping cart page which looks at each product in the cart, checks if other products are in the cart to complete a group, checks if an early bird discount is applicable etc.and then calculate a total discount. That total discount is then applied using a dedicated discount code which populates the hidden discount code field.
That being said, I really which there was a system parameter in the shopping cart I could just assign the total discount to - without having to use hidden form fields with javascript …
@TimL and @on.works - Thanks for your comments and I came to the same conclusion myself however the problem with that is that, apart from being akin to applying a band-aid to a broken bone, it falls way short of being able to reflect real world customer pricing where you might offer different discounts on different product catalogues or even products. The Discount code is across ALL catalogues or a single selected catalogue (can’t remember if that covers all child sub catalogues).
This is exactly why I have raised this post to gauge level of interest and hear the different views on how people might want this to work before raising it as a feature request.