Automating Pricing with Price Books

In CloudBlue Commerce, you can configure your portfolio so that for the selected group of products, prices for your customers are calculated based on the vendor's prices and the formulas that you define. This can be done using the following objects:

• Pricing groups. With pricing groups, you can group products that have the same pricing strategy.

• Pricing rules. A pricing rule defines the formulas to use for price calculation for a specific pricing group. They are defined inside price books, meaning that you can configure different pricing rules for the same pricing group in different price books.

• Price books. With price books, you can assign a set of pricing rules to the selected marketplace and operating unit accounts.

• Segments. Optionally, you can use segments to configure different pricing for specific customer segments within a marketplace.

Before configuring automated pricing, a tenant needs to install the Smart Price Books feature from CloudBlue Store:

1. In UX1, open CloudBlue Store.

2. Locate and click the Smart Price Books feature.

3. Click Install now.

After the feature is enabled, the following functionality becomes available:

• A tenant account can:

  • Create pricing groups.

  • Create price books and assign them to the operating unit and marketplace accounts in their account hierarchy.

• Operating units can load vendor-provided prices to the system from the UI, through a file upload, or using the API.

• Tenants and the accounts to which price books are assigned, can initiate price recalculation.

  Note: When a tenant account launches price recalculation, the prices are recalculated for all the accounts with that price book assigned. If price recalculation is launched by a child operating unit or marketplace account, prices are only recalculated in that account's hierarchy.

Limitations

1. This functionality is only available for product pricing and cannot be used for plan periods and composite resources.

2. Superseded MPNs are not supported. During price recalculation, products with the original and superseded MPNs are treated as the same product, and the price is updated identically for both.

3. Currently, Vendor and List prices can only be imported in a currency that matches the account’s sales currency. If you receive vendor prices in a different currency, convert them to the account sales currency before importing to Price Manager.