Hi,
By itself, a pricing priority is just a number and a description. Pricing priorities can be applied to price groups, or they can be applied directly to discounts. When pricing priorities are used, they let a retailer override the principle of the best price by controlling the order in which prices and discounts are applied to products. A larger pricing priority number is evaluated before a lower pricing priority number. Additionally, if a price or discount is found at any priority number, all prices or discounts that have lower priority numbers are ignored.
The price and a discount can come from two different pricing priorities, because pricing priorities apply to prices and discounts independently.
To use pricing priority for prices, you must assign a pricing priority to a price group and then create a sales price trade agreement for that price group.
The pricing priority feature was introduced to support the scenario where a retailer wants to apply higher prices in a specific set of stores. For example, a retailer has defined regional prices for the east coast of the United States but wants higher prices for some products in New York City stores, because it costs more to sell some products in the city, and/or because the local market will bear a higher price.
As was described in the "Best price" section of this topic, the retail pricing engine typically selects the lower of two prices. Therefore, the retailer is usually prevented from using the higher of two prices in a store that has both the East coast and New York price groups. To resolve this issue before the pricing priority feature was introduced, the retailer had to define prices for every product two times and not assign both price groups. Alternatively, the retailer had to create extra price groups to isolate the products that have higher prices from products that have the usual, lower prices.
However, the pricing priority feature lets the retailer create a pricing priority for store prices that is higher than the pricing priority for regional prices. Alternatively, the retailer can create a pricing priority just for store prices and leave regional prices at the default pricing priority, which is 0 (zero). Both setups help guarantee that store prices will always be used before regional prices.
Pricing priority example
Let's look at an example where store prices override other prices.
A national retailer sets most prices per region, and it has four regions: North east, South east, Mid-west and West. It has identified several high-cost markets that can support higher prices. These markets are in New York City, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area.
For this example, we will drill into the North east region. Store 1 is in Boston, and store 2 is in Manhattan. For the Boston store, two price groups are linked to the channel: North East and Store 1. For the Manhattan store, three price groups are linked to the channel: North East, NYC, and Store 2.
The retailer sets up two pricing priorities: High cost has a priority number of 5, and Store prices has a priority number of 10. (Remember that, by default, the pricing priority is 0 [zero], and a price or discount that has a higher priority number is used before a price or discount that has a lower priority number.) For the North East price group, the pricing priority is left at the default value of 0 (zero). For the NYC price group, the pricing priority is set to 5, because New York City is a high-cost market. For the Store 1 and Store 2 price groups, the pricing priority is set to 10.
Two products that the retailer sells are product 1, a commodity T-shirt, and product 2, brand-specific fashion jeans.
The T-shirt sells for the same price (that is, $15) at both the Boston and Manhattan stores, because only one price is set in the North East price group that is linked to both channels. The fashion jeans sell for $50 in the Boston store, because that price is the only price that is available in that store. However, in the Manhattan store, two prices are available: $50 and $70. Because the pricing priority of 5 for the NYC price group is higher than the pricing priority of 0 (zero) for the North East price group, the price will be rung up as $70 in the POS system.
