Question
How do you handle prices with your integration? Which system is the keeper of record when it comes to prices? Is it my POS system or is it the website? How do prices get updated? How many different prices can I have on the website? Will you update the sale price as well?
As you can see, I have a lot of questions around how you handle prices with your integration. Could you please shed some light here? Thank you.
Answer
Yes, you have a lot of questions, but they are all very good. I'm going to use the following diagram to explain how pricing updates work between your point of sale (POS) system and your Bigcommerce, Magento, Shopify or WooCommerce website.
Prices
As you can see from the diagram, products flow from your POS system to your website. Every item in your catalog can have 3 different prices:
- Retail Price
- Sale Price
- Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP)
Item-Level Pricing
Every POS or ERP system we integrate with today can send us these 3 prices for every item in your catalog. By item, I mean for each variant such as Size and Color. For example, a t-shirt could have the following Retail Prices:
- Small - $20
- Medium - $20
- Large - $20
- X-Large - $20
- XX-Large - $22
As you can see from the above example, the XX-Large size costs $2 more or $22. This means we're getting individual prices for each size from the POS system and passing them along to your website. How you display these prices is entirely up to you and can look different from what's shown above.
The exact same thing is being doing for Sale Prices and MSRP. Meaning, you can also display Sale Prices and MSRP on an item-by-item basis.
Pricing Master & Slave
As the diagram above shows, we do typically like the POS or ERP system to be the "master" when it comes to pricing. Meaning, changes to prices within the POS system will automatically flow to the e-commerce platform which is the "slave."
This approach typically works the best given many POS systems have sophisticated features around pricing that allow you to make bulk pricing adjustments.
Minimum Advertised Pricing
The one exception to this rule we hear is typically around Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP). Retailers sometimes want to show a price online that's different from what's in their POS system. Very often, this can be done directly within the POS system, but when it can't, they ask us to turn off the updating of prices. This is easy for us to do and something that can be done done with every integration. For more information, please read:
I think that answers all your questions. Please let us know if you need anything else. Thank you.