Dear Inventory: Advanced Pricing Module

Easier access to Dear Inventory advanced pricing

Dear Inventory has a powerful advanced pricing module in addition to the standard ten price lists and customer-level discounts.

It also has an interim layer of customer price lists per SKU. Dear's pricing is complicated and has too many choices, but it is powerful.

King of all of these is what I call the Advanced Pricing Module, which Dear calls the Deals and Discounts module.

For a long time, I had to make this note:  "Not many clients use the advanced features because it's hard to understand and hard to set up; for example, the second step requires a CSV upload in many cases."

Dear added a graphical front end to advanced pricing, making it easier to use, but this was still clunky for more than a few rules, since there was no bulk update feature. 

But in October 2021, Dear has added good API end points allowing powerful automation and updates for this module. Below, I discuss how these rules are created in the backend. API supports opens the possibility of using this for more complex businesses.

 

Advanced pricing is the place to add quantity breaks and free shipping rules, as well as much more.

Dear Inventory has several ways of calculating pricing. Pricing for many businesses in complex, and Dear is rising to meet this ... with complex choices.

1. Simple price lists. Dear has ten.

2. Customer discount percentage of a simple price list

3. Customer price lists, at sku level. You can upload CSVs of SKU-based pricing per customer.

4. Markup pricing: You can define pricing based on cost price data

5. Advanced pricing, the topic of this article. Advanced pricing arrives at a particular price for a customer/product combination, the same as (2). However, you can define rules for groups of products, group of customers, and you can do quantity breaks too.

Finally, the rules can have start and end dates, something else you can't do with standard price lists.

The spur for this has been the drive to add B2B and later B2C portals to Dear, and there are some features added to the advanced pricing module which are only for these new sales channels. 

In Advanced Pricing, there are two concepts: Discounts and Deals.
The 'Discount' says what will happen, and the Deal defines when it happens, based on the date, the customer and the product. 

The rules have start and end times (for promotions) and can trigger on products based on SKU, tag, brand or category, and on customer code, customer type or tag.  That's very powerful. 

You can access it via Settings -> Reference Books -> Product Deals. Although first, you need to define a Discount rule to add to the Deal.

To use it:
The new form lets you apply a discount to some customers for some products, over some period.
You need to create the "discount" first, though.

Also, you must click the "Apply Discounts" button in order entry. I don't know why. I guess this is a transitional setting.

Step 1: Create discount rules

Creating discounts is done in Settings -> Reference Books -> Stock -> Product Discounts
There are three types of discounts, but 'Free Shipping' and 'Order Level' are only applicable to the Dear B2B portal.

So for the usual Dear order flow, you consider "simple discount" and "volume discounts". Volume discounts are commonly known as quantity breaks. The "volume" refers to the quantity sold on the order line. 

The Dear support article is: http://dearsystems.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/1000132666

"Discounts" are the "what happens" part.

Simple discounts are the most common. They include quantity breaks,
The discount and markup rules apply to the price the customer would get if the discount rule were not applied. 

From the Dear article:

Types of Discount values:

  • Discount amount – all prices will be reduced by this Amount, e.g. ‘$10 off all stock’ campaign. That is, the change modifies the price calculated by the standard pricing (based on the price list and any customer or product discounts).
  • % Discount– all prices will be reduced by the percent specified, e.g. ‘10% off all stock’ campaign. 
  • Markup Amount – all prices will be increased by this Amount.
  • % Markup – all prices will be increased by the percent specified.
  • Price Override –this Amount is new price for the product, with no reference to what was there before.
  • Flat Amount – total line cost will be this Amount.

Note that Flat Amount caps the line price, completely regardless of quantity ordered. 

Step 2: Create Deals

A Deal lets you choose when a discount rule is triggered. The selections include a date range, specific or groups of tagged customers, products specified by SKU, category or brand.


Deals also offer "order-level" discounts. A pre-configured example is free-shipping once an order reaches a value threshold.

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