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Price Groups in Miva 5.5

While Availability Groups allow you to offer select products only to certain customers, Price Groups allow you to offer the same products to all customers but at different prices.

Product pricing for Price Groups can be the actual retail price, a fixed discounted price (such as $5.00), a percentage off from the actual store price (such as 10% off), or a markup from the product cost (such as 60% above the cost).

Price Groups can be offered to different customers for different reasons, including:

Wholesale—you might offer products to resellers, such as other online (or offline) retailers, or people with Web sites and storefronts who also want to offer your product(s).

Select Customer Program—you might offer your best customers a fixed price on certain items, or a percentage off one or many products.

Rewards for Creating Customer Accounts—you could tell all customers that if they create a Customer Account, they will be offered discounts.

Members-Only Program—you might offer members of a club a percentage off products in the store.

There is something to keep in mind, however.

While it's possible to assign customers to many price groups (and allow them to purchase at the lowest price possible), and it's possible to create many groups with various discount percentages, there's only one cost (wholesale, or other assigned discount cost) that can be applied to any product. This is the amount you entered (or will enter) in the Cost field in the actual product create/edit screen.

In other words, you can have a dozen Price Groups, all offering various percentages of discounts. But any Price Group which uses the Cost field will carry the same cost as any of the other groups.

It is also possible to use Price Groups in conjunction with Availability Groups.

For example, you might offer members of a club access to all the exclusive products, but members of different levels might have different pricing. Thus, one member might be assigned to one Price Group, and another may be assigned to another Price Group, yet both members may be assigned to the same Availability Group which houses those products.

Types of Pricing

Before creating a Price Group, we need to analyze the various types of costs involved.

Retail – the retail price of the product, which is the price all customers (any of those not assigned to a price group) see by default in the store

Cost – either the wholesale rate you are offering, or another fixed price you will offer to certain Customers

Discount From Retail – a percentage off the Retail price

Markup From Cost – a percentage added to the product Cost

It is up to you (or your pricing staff) to determine which way you will offer your Price Groups to your selected customers for that group.

The Percentage Issue

It's possible you are not able to offer the same percentage discount on all products. This usually calls for creating (and assigning customers to) more than one price group. MIVA Merchant can handle several price groups, and customers can be assigned to none, some, or all of them. For example, if you sell new toys and can only offer 10% off Pokemon cards, but want to offer 15% off the new Lego sets, then you would create two Price Groups (one for 10% and one for 15%) and then assign the appropriate products to each one. Percentages do not have to be whole numbers (1%, 2%). You can enter a fraction of a percent (.25%, .50%), or a combination percentage (1.5%, 4.7%).

The Cost Issue

When you created your products, you were shown a Cost field. You can use this field for discount pricing if you wish. It's totally up to you. Just because the field is labeled cost does not mean you cannot use it for other pricing factors.

Creating a Price Group

Once you've figured how you are going to offer the discount, you can add the Price Group to your store.

In the Admin Menu, click the Add link next to Price Groups
Enter a Name for this Price Group. Your customers will not see this name
Select the Pricing method. If a percentage, add it as a number with no % sign
Click the Add button

Editing Price Groups

After you've created a Price Group, you will automatically be taken to the Edit Price Group screen, where you can begin assigning customers and products. If you need to edit an existing group, click on the + next to Price Groups, then click the link of the Price Group you want to edit. In the Edit Price Group screen, you can make changes to the Pricing method for this group the same way you defined the discount method when you created the group.

Assigning Customers Price Groups

In the Edit Price Group screen, click the Customers link
The same way you did for an Availability Group, check off all the customers you want to assign to this group
Click the Update button

Assigning Products to Price Groups

Just as with Availability Groups, you need to assign products to your Price Group. You can decide to offer discounts on all products or just a few products.

Click the Products link
Check off all products you want to assign to this group
Click the Update button

To add all products at once, choose to view more than 10 per page, then use the + button in the Assigned column to select them all at once.

Deleting Price Groups

Deleting a Price Group will have no effect on the actual products, categories or customers in the store. The only change will be that none of them will be associated with this particular group, because it will no longer exist.

In the Admin Menu, Price Groups link
Check off the box next to the price group you want to delete
Click the Delete button