Customer group price lists

Handshake supports defining additional prices on both items and variants through price lists. This is useful for a variety of scenarios, from simple ones like defining prices in multiple currencies to more complex ones like price tiers for multi-brand sellers. If you have only a single price list, you can safely ignore this section and the several related ones that follow.

Setting up price lists for customer groups

The simpler scenarios for price lists involve those associated with customer groups. You can, for example:

• Group customers by the currency they use to buy your products and define prices for each of those currencies. In this scenario, you'd have a group of customers who transact in US dollars, euros, pounds etc.

• Group customers by price tier and define a price list for each status. In this scenario, you'd have, say, one customer group for the platinum tier customers, one for the gold tier customers, and one for the silver tier customers, with each of those groups specifying (presumably discounted) prices for the group's customers. (Note: the group price lists only have to specify the prices that are discounts; if the price list doesn't define a price for an item, the customers in that group will get the standard price.)

• Combine the two preceding concepts, with a platinum tier US dollars group, a platinum tier euros group, etc.

If either of these scenarios fit your setup, you need to set up your customer groups before defining your price lists. If your pricing scenario is more complex, you'll need to use customer and manufacturer specific price lists.

Importing customer group price lists with your products

The simplest way to import small price lists for customer groups is by adding new columns with headings of the format unitPrice:<customer_group_ID> to your items spreadsheet. For example, if you have a customer group for retailers who transact in Australian dollars and that group has an ID of "AU", the column header for Australian dollar prices should be unitPrice:AU.

A few notes on this import:

• The numbers for each price list are in the currency of the customer group - no field or need to specify the currency.
• If you leave a cell blank in an additional price column, the price will default to the value in the standard unitPrice column.
• If you want to mark a particular product as being unavailable to a particular customer group, then you can put the special value NA into the cell in that column. Customers in that group will then be unable to purchase that item. In the screenshot above, the Bass Trombone on the bottom row isn't available to sell in Australia dollars and so has been marked unavailable to the Australian retailers group.

One disadvantage of using this approach is that since the item importer operates in replace-all mode, you must supply all prices for all price lists for all items when they are imported, which can be burdensome if you have a very large number of additional prices for each item.

Importing customer group prices separately to your products

The Advanced section of the bulk import screen also includes a dedicated price importer, which allows you to specify a single additional price per row. To import customer list prices, you'll need to use the following columns:

• type: should be either "item" or "variant", indicating whether the price is for an item or a variant.
• sku: the item or variant SKU that the price is for.
• customerGroup: the customer group ID that this price is for.
• unitPrice: the price of a single unit, or "NA" if you want to restrict the specified customer group from being able to buy this item or variant.

The advantage of this method of price import is that it allows you to update a partial set of your prices without having to reupload the entire set of all your prices. For example, if you have 100,000 prices in your database but only update 1,000 of them on a weekly basis, the price importer may be a more efficient way to go about updating them regularly.