Special Customer Pricing and Discounts

[eck247]

Hi Everyone,

Hope someone can help me , been pulling my hair out for days thinking about this.

We have 3 different product groups.

Customers receive different discounts from each group. I achieve this by using the customer & product groups and discounts tabs.

I had originally used a straight forward discount associated to the customer group but this assigns the discount accross all products which was unsuitable for our site. It meant i had to manually insert pricing into 2 of the product groups. FYI Product Group A gets 60% , Product Group B gets 70% , Product Group C gets 10%. And i am running V9 Business Plus.

My problem is i have a few customers who receive special pricing on a selection of products. Is there someway i can do this ?

[leehack]

Copy/paste the products in question (not paste as duplicate), assign them to a new group and then apply your discount accordingly.

[eck247]

Thanks for the swift reply.

Was hoping this would not be the answer

The several customers who receive special pricing receive special pricing on some different items. So would have to maintain several duplicate groups. We also use stock monitoring so not sure what effects this would have with several duplicate items.

[leehack]

You have to either anchor your pricing to a structure that only allows a product to sit in one group or work outside of it like this, can't think of anything else you could do. Although if it's a lot of products and stock monitoring in place, duplicate products is not a good idea at all.

Can't it be streamlined? 3 people get 3 different discounts but another 4th group gets extra special? Hows about having just the products in question in a group and tiered pricing according to the group or is this what you were saying you can't do?

[eck247]

We actually have 4 Product Groups , each group has approx 20 items.

Customers receive different %discount from each group.

But , a few customers receive special pricing on a selection of items from different groups simply because we have agreed a special fixed price for them.

I understand what you say about 4th group having special prices , but the special priced items totally vary dependant upon the customer. So probably no 2 customers receive the same special pricing.

[leehack]

Hmm bear with me as i try to imagine the scenario. Why can't you do customer groups and assign prices for each product on the prices tab to those groups. You can then set the price for your 3 set groups and add in the individual prices for the special groups on the special products?

Or am i barking up the wrong tree again?

[eck247]

But can a product be part of 2 Product Groups ?

Or do you mean create a Special Customer Group ? If so , would i have to manually input prices for every single product for the special group ?

[leehack]

It can't be in 2 groups unless you workaround as i mentioned. However, it doesn't need to be, a price is attached to a customer group and that price is defined on the product. If you want special people to have special prices and all different, i can't see how else other than manually inputting those prices, you could achieve that.

NB - my first day back, brain not fully in gear, I could be talking total crap....

[eck247]

Thanks for all your help.

I think i will go with your original suggestion and duplicate the product and switch off the stock monitoring.

Probably duplicating the products is the lesser of 2 evils.

Thanks again mate for all your help , well impressed with this forum since i started using it just a few weeks ago when we purchased our first copy of actinic.

Alex.

[cbarling]

Assuming you have business or above, then if you create accounts for your customers you can specify different product prices for different sets of customer accounts.

So it's not done by discounting at all.

Chris

[eck247]

Hi Chris,

I think the problem i hit when i do it your way is that i have to assign a pricing schedule to the customer group , but i have 4 different product types , with each product type having approx 20 products , and each product type has a different discount percentage. So i can't assign a pricing schedule because that assigns the same discount accross all products !!!!

Or am i missing an option somewhere ?

oh , and i am running business plus.

Thanks.

[eck247]

Just as a follow-up to this...

Since all products in our catalog would be eligible for some sort of discount would it be possible to show the potential discounted price thats associated to the customers group next to the RRP ? I read something about creating a variable for the RRP and tried to following a php script from LHORTON but for some reason couldnt get it to work

Not even sure if that script would do what im looking for !!!

Anyone think this is possible ?

[cbarling]

I don't think that would work as Actinic uses it's internal pricing for all calculations.

You can achieve the effect using a discount schedule as I suggested .But you have to enter each price against the product and discount schedule on the pricing tab for the product i.e. you can set ANY price for a particular product for a particular schedule, you aren't restricted to a schedule just being x% below the main price.

Hope that I haven't mis-understood what you need here and that makes sense.

Chris

[eck247]

Thanks for the reply chris,

problem being :-

Some customers receive the following discounts

Product Group A - 60%
Product Group B - 10%
Product Group C - 40%

And others receive

Product Group A - 40%
Product Group B - 5%
Product Group C - 45%

etc etc , there are lots of different scenario's in our business where customers will receive totally different discounts from particular product groups.

I think , (maybe wrong) , your way i could set the discount schedule to match only 1 product group but would have to then manually enter pricing for all products in other groups for every possible discount !!

[cbarling]

That's correct.

However, you could calculate the prices in a spreadsheet and then import using the hierarchical import, which I believe allows all of the schedule/product prices to be specified. However, I haven't checked the details in the help so I could be wrong.

You might feel this is more trouble, but it's there if you want.

Chris