Pricing

Overview

The Price Management (Pricing) module of CloudBlue Connect allows to establish and automate a cost-effective process of price lists exchange from Vendors to Distributors as schematically illustrated below:

Pricing flow is an optional part of the Product flow:

Vendors create Price Lists and make those available to Distributors by attaching them to the corresponding Listings.

Price List and its Versions

Two key objects of the Price Management Module are highlighted with red in the following diagram:

• Price List – is a container of Price List Versions that has the following attributes:
  • ID – unique immutable ID of the given Price List
  • Status – an indicator of the current state of the Price List (Draft, Scheduled, Active, Terminated)
  • Name – short name defined by the Vendor that outlines its purpose, like “Pricing for NA market”, “Pricing for Ingram Micro DE”, etc.
  • Description – longer details field outlining additional information related to the price list required
  • Currency – a currency that is used in the Price List
  • Precision – a data precision of the prices with up to be up to 8 decimal digits (i.e. 0.00000001)
• Price List Version – an object that resides within a particular Price List and acts as a container for various values associated with items for each attribute of the Price List
  • ID – unique immutable ID of the given Price List Version object
  • Status – an indicator of the current state of the Price List Version (Draft, Scheduled, Active, Expired)
  • Start at (UTC) – date and time when Price points from the Price List Version become “effective”.
  • Description – longer details field outlining additional information related to the Price List Version required

You can think of the Price List as a “template” for versions as schematically illustrated in these diagrams:

With the following state machine associated with each object:

With each management step described in the following paragraphs of this article.

Vendor Portal

Creating Price List

Navigate to the Pricing module

Price Lists are managed in the “Pricing” module of the Vendor Portal:

Click “Add Price List” in order to create a new one:

And follow the steps of the wizard described below.

Assign General Settings

Populate general attributes like Name, Currency, Precision, and Description:

Associate Products

Associate Price List with one or more Products:

Note that at least one product is required.

Define Attributes

Define attributes to be assigned to each item of the Price List:

You can choose from the list of System-defined and create Custom attributes as needed. Note that at least 1 attribute is required to create a Price List.

Create Initial Price List Version

Set attributes of the initial Price List Version:

Click “Create” to get to the Summary step:

You can now navigate to the Price List Version and populate the values of the initial version.

Activate Price List Version

Follow these steps to active a Price List Version.

Navigate to the Price List Version

You can navigate to the Price List Version either from the Price List details or directly from the top-level Versions collection:

Populate Values

In order to populate values of the Price List version, you can either use User Interface of the Vendor Portal:

Our bulk Export/Import functionality available from the menu at the top right corner:

Once all values are populated, you will be able to activate the version:

Activate Version

Click “Activate” button at the top right corner:

Version can be scheduled for a future date or activated immediately:

Once “Active”, Price List can be attached to the Listing:

Associate Price List with the Listing

In order to make a Price List visible to the Distributor, it needs to be associated with the Listing. This could be done both for new and existing listings.

Navigate to the Listings Management

In order to associate Price List with the Listing, you will need to switch to the Listings Management Module:

Launch Listing Wizard

And click “Manage Listings”:

You can either create new or choose existing listing in the Listings Management wizard.

Choose Price List

The “Price List” step is used to manage Price List assignment:

Distributor Portal

Access Vendor Price Lists

Once Vendor associates Price Lists with the listing, that Price List becomes visible to the corresponding Distributor:

Therefore, Distributors can either manually or automatically export the latest versions of the Price List to their systems.