VP-ASP supports three methods for customer based pricing
- Dividing customers into groups such as wholesaler, retailer or any other type you choose. Each see a different price. See below for a description on how this works
- Using the customerprices table. For each customer you specify the product or category of products and a discount price is shown. This is a relatively obsolete method and is described in the Developer's guide.
- Set a discount value in the customer record. The entire order is discounted by this percentage regardless of what products are being purchased
Customer Based Pricing -What do you have to do:
Customers can be separated into types such as retail, wholesale; distributor and each can "see" a different price for the same product. The prices are stored in the product record and not dynamically looked up in the customer prices table.
1. Tell VP-ASP what types of customers you have
2. Tell VP-ASP where to find their prices
3. For each customer you want a special price for, put their customer type in their customer record
VP-ASP does the rest
For example
| Price level (a) | Price level (b) | Price level (c) |
| 100 | 95.00 | 60.00 |
Shop Configuration Values
The VP-ASP Shop Configuration is used to tell VP-ASP the types of customers you have and where to find their prices. When you install this enhancement, three new Shop Configuration values are added.
The following Shop Configuration values control this enhanced customer pricing
| xcustomerprices | Yes Turns on customer based products |
| xcustomerpriceidentifier | contacttypeid
The field in the customer record used to distinguish different customers. contacttypeid is the default. You can use any field in the customers record to hold the information that tells VP-ASP the type of customer this is |
| xcustomerpricetypes | 1,2,3
This says there are three types of customers. Type 1 and type 2 and type 3 If you use a text field instead of contacttypeid (which is a number) the different types can be text such as: a,b,c |
| xcustomerpricefields | pother5,pricedistrib,cprice
Fields where prices are entered in the products table. These are the fields in the products table where the prices can be found. |
How Customer pricing works
First you must turn on customer based pricing by setting in Shop Configuration.
| xcustomerprices | Yes |
Next you must tell VP-ASP which field in the customers table identifies specific customer types. By default VP-ASP will use the normally unused field contacttypeid which is a numeric field but you can use any other field such as custother1 or any field that you add to the customers table.
| xcustomerpriceidentifier |
contacttypeid (a number field) or custother1 (a text field) |
Next Tell VP-ASP which types of customers you have. Say you have three types. Retail, wholesale and distributor and they see three different prices. You want retail customers to see the normal price (cprice) but you want wholesalers to see another price and distributors to see a third price. You decide to use custother1 to tell VP-ASP which customers are which.
You do not have to do anything for retail customers. For the others you create an entry in the Shop Configuration. Any keywords will do as long as they match the value you put for the customer in the custother1 field above.
| xcustomerpricetypes | Wholesale,Distributor |
The last thing is to tell VP-ASP which field in the product's table to find the prices. You want the wholesale price to be in pother1 and the distributor price to be in pother2. Again any fields can be used. The order is important. The first field is used for the first name in the xcustomerpricetypes.
You can also add additional fields to products table if you wish. The fields used below already exist.
| xcustomerpricefields | pother1,pother2 |
How prices are determined
Normal retail customers will have no value in the field custother1 (xcustomerpriceidentifier) and therefor will see the normal retail price.
Wholesale and Distributors would login before they shop and VP-ASP will save their customer type. When a product is displayed a lookup is done to determine which field in the products table to use as their price by matching the customertype with values in customerpricetypes and determining which fields to use xcustomerpricefields.
Template Display
If you are using templates to display shopdisplayproducts.asp, you will need to change your template (usually tmp_productformat.htm) to use a special formatting function to display the price -
[formatcustomerprice cprice]
For more information on templates, please see our Template Help Note.