Advanced pricing logic in Norce Commerce
Pricing is one of the most business-critical parts of any commerce operation. It touches margins, customer relationships, campaign strategy, and competitive positioning – often simultaneously. In Norce Commerce, pricing is designed to handle that complexity without requiring you to manage every price manually.
At the core is a layered pricing model. Standard prices form the baseline, either calculated directly in Norce from purchase cost or unit cost, or synchronized from your ERP if that is where your pricing logic lives. From there, market-specific price lists, campaign prices, and customer-specific agreement prices are all evaluated for each request, and the best price for the customer is applied automatically. Company discounts can be added as a percentage on top, and promotions are handled separately in the cart, keeping campaign logic cleanly separated from your catalogue prices.
The price calculation methods give you meaningful control over how prices are set. You can work with fixed prices, cost-plus rules with a defined uplift, or margin-based rules where Norce ensures a target margin is maintained regardless of cost fluctuations. Recommended price can be used as the base for calculation, and competitive pricing lets you peg your prices to external competitor data, with rules for preferred market position, minimum margin floors, and per-category adjustments. All these methods can be combined across price lists, applied globally or down to individual product level.
For B2B merchants, the pricing model goes further. Customer-specific price lists can reflect negotiated agreements, covering both unique prices and unique assortments. These can be mirrored from the ERP or maintained directly in Norce, and the platform is built to handle thousands of simultaneous price lists without performance issues. Volume pricing through quantity breaks lets you offer lower unit prices at higher order quantities, with the pricing method per break configurable independently. On top of all of this, sales teams can apply company discounts as an additional layer – without touching the underlying agreement prices.
Campaigns are managed through dedicated campaign price lists with defined start and end dates, inheriting from standard or market prices and automatically staying in sync when parent prices change. For more dynamic offers – buy-one-get-one, discount codes, free shipping thresholds – the promotion engine handles those at checkout, with a flexible rule system that can be as simple or as granular as the offer requires.
What ties it together is that these layers work in sequence and do not conflict. Standard prices, market adjustments, customer agreements, company discounts, and promotions each operate in their own layer, with a clear priority order. The result is that the right price reaches the right customer under the right conditions, without manual intervention at every step.
For retailers managing large and volatile assortments, that reliability is what makes pricing manageable at scale.