Special and Volume Prices
Two ways to charge less than the base price, with quite different purposes.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Commercial:
- Carts — the cart itself and its options
Architect Panel → Data:
- Datastores — then View Data on the cart table, and look for the row actions
Special prices
A replacement price for a product, in a currency, with a start and an expiry. And critically, a flag deciding whether the product is excluded from offers while on special.
That flag is what stops a promotional code stacking on top of a sale price — which is how a discount campaign turns out to have been unexpectedly expensive.
Always set the expiry
A special price without an end date is a permanent price reduction that nobody decided to make. Sales end; put the date in when you create it, not later.
Volume pricing
A price that applies above a minimum order quantity, set per product. Several tiers can exist, so ten, fifty and a hundred can each have a price.
This is the trade mechanism — it is how you offer a case price without maintaining separate case products.
Check the tiers make sense
Tiers are entered independently, so nothing stops a hundred costing more per unit than fifty. Read them back as a list after entering them, because the error is invisible on a single row and obvious in a column.
Volume pricing and minimum order quantity are different
Minimum order quantity says the customer cannot buy fewer. Volume pricing says buying more costs less each. Confusing them produces either a shop nobody can buy from or a trade discount everybody gets.
Watch what they cost together
A special price plus a volume break plus a discount code is three reductions on one line. Model the worst case before running a promotion, and use the offer exclusion where the combination would be unprofitable.
Review what is on special
Periodically. Special prices accumulate — set for a campaign, extended, forgotten — and a shop where a third of the catalogue is permanently reduced has simply repriced itself without deciding to.
Worked example
A shop runs seasonal special prices with fixed end dates and offers excluded, and volume tiers at 10, 25 and 100 for trade lines. A quarterly review of active special prices found four that had been extended twice and were now simply the price, which were made the base price instead.
Recommendations
- Always set an expiry on a special price.
- Exclude specials from offers unless you mean to stack.
- Read volume tiers back as a list.
- Review active specials quarterly.