How to: Setup automatic Price Adjustment

SoftwareProjects Payment Center lets you define a formula that will enforce a desired target profit margin for all of your products.

This is very useful if you have fluctuating supplier costs, seasonal price differences or any other external factor that impacts your pricing structure.

Price Control can be defined on a per store level, configuring different formulas for different stores. As an example, a lot of our customers go with more competitive pricing for the eBay store vs. higher prices for the standard website (PPC-driven) store.

To setup price control, click on 'Product Manager', then 'Stores', then click on the store you'd like to manage. Scroll down and you will see the price control options -



When does the Price Control script gets executed?

SoftwareProjects Payment Center connects to all of your stores daily and per every product listed, if PriceControl is enabled, the Payment Center will call the Price Control script to calculate the target price for that product. If the price needs adjustment, the Payment Center will automatically update the price on your store and log the event.

When viewing orders under the order manager, the Payment Center once again calculates the target price per every product sold and in case 'price paid' is lower than target price, Payment Center will tag that order as a 'loss order'. Note that certain pending orders may be tagged as 'loss orders' if you update the price control script, increasing the desired target profit margin while you have outstanding orders waiting to be processed.

For maximum flexibility, the price control script lets you enter any combination of PHP 4.x commands, manipulating several predefined fields and setting the desired price for each product into the '$price' variable.

Example Price Control


This price control script defines a target profit margin of 1.3. Then, per every product, it multiplies the cost by the target profit margin and adds fixed cost of marketing. If the end result is lower than the desired minimum price it is adjusted.

Then the resulting number is placed into '$price'

The Payment Center will automatically update the price on all stores based on this formula.

Note - cost of marketing is automatically calculated for you based on the store type. For example, on eBay it costs $0.25 + 10% to list every product. The Payment Center will set 'cost_of_marketing' for each product with these parameters, making it easy for you to bundle these costs into the desired target price.

More about Loss Orders

Loss orders are calculated based on this formula -

If Price customer paid < Target price based on pricecontrol script, then order is a loss order.

To avoid old outstanding orders getting tagged as 'loss orders', we recommend you process all outstanding orders prior to making changes to the price control script, or understand that certain orders may be tagged as losses although they are only losses based on your recent price control adjustments.

How you choose to handle orders tagged as losses is completely up to you. By default, when exporting all pending orders, loss orders will not be included in the batch. You have to manually click on 'Loss Orders' (under Order Manager) to export these orders.

Some vendors decide to refund and cancel all loss orders to avoid a real loss, while others choose to go ahead and process all loss orders in favor of good customer service.

Warning

Since the Price Control script is a piece of code that gets executed per every single one of your products, it is very important that you consult your SoftwareProjects account manager prior to making any changes to this script. Changes are immediately applied to your store and an incorrect setting might lead to setting prices below your target profit margin.