Price lists have always been at the backbone of distribution and channel distribution. They are the source of truth on what price the Distributors should resell the Vendor’s products at and how margins are calculated.
With the evolution of e-commerce and multi-tier channel distribution, price lists have become increasingly more complex with the addition of more levels of resellers, resulting in additional pricing margins and calculations to determine at each level.
Though the level of complexity is increasing, focusing on digitally transforming your price lists and supporting processes provides a clear opportunity to get operational benefits by streamlining and centrally managing these interactions.
Historically, partner pricing management was done with wholesale price books. Upon entering the digital age, those price books became spreadsheets that outlined all the different potential margins, currencies, and prices across all the vendor’s products, and remained isolated and siloed solutions within emails. As both product line and partner ecosystems have grown, this has created an asymptotic notation situation – where the possibilities theoretically approach an infinite number of scenarios.
With CloudBlue, we saw an opportunity to simplify and centralize price list management for hundreds of our worldwide Vendors and Distribution Partners.
Each of these Vendors have their own price lists and all the Providers have their own rules to consume such price lists information (such as currency, cost+/MSRP-, etc.). The opportunity was to create a common platform that allows Vendors to easily input their price lists and manage it across their product lines and to the specific Partners. Additionally, from a Provider’s perspective, it is imperative to be able to define the price list rules and be able to update their prices to the most recent numbers provided by the Vendors.
In CloudBlue V20 (released July 2020), we were able to introduce a powerful feature set that enabled our CloudBlue Vendors and Providers to efficiently manage price lists across their channels and partners.
With our Pricing Module, Vendors are able to submit prices for specific products/items per Provider in the conditions that the specific Provider has set. These conditions include setting the required prices in terms of cost+ or MSRP-, and other reseller configurations that the Provider might want (such as Tier 1 or Tier 2 pricing).
Additional configurations that the Provider can set include currency and precision – useful for defining the exact amounts in currencies worldwide and for products that might be sold in packs less than a hundred of a certain amount (e.g., less than 1 cent per GB).
We’ve also introduced a versioning capability with these price lists. This means that whenever a price list is updated, Vendors can create a new version of that price list – whether it is quarterly, twice a year, or annually. This allows both Vendors and Providers to submit and receive, respectively, the latest prices of the products and services being sold.
Vendors can take advantage of this feature either through the Pricing Module or directly in the Pricing Tab in the Product Configurator (Product Module). When the price list is configured, through an easy pre-defined spreadsheet template through CloudBlue, it can be submitted as a listing along with the product. This allows the Providers to manage both the product listing and pricing associated with that product in one flow.
From a provider’s perspective, it is equally as easy.
Providers can set the rules of the price list in their Marketplace settings. In these settings, the Provider can choose the pre-set configurable price list options and add their own custom attributes that may be requested accompanying these price list numbers.
The Pricing Module itself will show all active price lists from all Vendors and their products so that Provider’s operational teams can quickly view and update their prices in their commerce systems accordingly.
As our Vendors and Providers adopt and take advantage of this powerful price list functionality, they will discover the operational benefits of having CloudBlue digitally manage what once was buried in thousands of emails. CloudBlue makes it easy to configure price list rules, upload those price lists, and maintain the price information so that the channel experience for our Vendors and Providers is a smooth and seamless operation. See it in action with our Vendor Price Updates Management with CloudBlue video.
If you’re ready to digitally transform your price list and channel pricing processes, we can help. Contact the CloudBlue team today and request more information on CloudBlue.
