In a typical distributorship, prices will be a factor of many variables.  A customer may qualify for certain pricing levels based on purchase commitments.  Pricing may be set based on other unrelated commitments.  Pricing may even be a factor in the literal supply and demand of a given product.  Ultimately, the way or reason a particular item is priced isn’t relevant to WebAlliance pricing however, the fact that items do not all share the same prices is very important to the topic.

Because it is impossible to look at an item by itself (e.g. without knowing the customer and location) and determine a price, WebAlliance uses a method of asking your ERP solution for the pricing of an item.  This pricing mechanism means that the pricing WebAlliance shows to users online is not determined by WebAlliance, but by your ERP. 

When an online shopper needs to see a price for an item, WebAlliance will make a request of the gateway services for a price.  Note that this request consists of the Part Number, the Customer Code, and the Location identifier.  Using these key pieces of information, the pricing for the item will be generated using the information from your ERP system. 

Because prices come from your ERP system, any price adjustment that needs to be reflected on your website should be done from your ERP.  If you need to change the price for a customer online, you will utilize the pricing functions of your ERP system to make the adjustments needed for the ERP system to price the item as desired.  With that change made, WebAlliance will show the updated pricing to the web users.  There is not a separate process to pricing items ‘for the web’ vs. ‘for the ERP’.  All pricing comes from the same source: your ERP system’s pricing concepts.

The user Tom is browsing your website.  Tom’s web account is attached to Customer Code 399383 (General Merchandise Supplier).  Tom is looking at item STN 30456 (a Stanley Tape Measure).  The pricing Tom sees is $27.98/EA.

If you want to change the pricing Tom sees for this item, you will access your ERP system to change the appropriate pricing mechanism.

Note that all ERP pricing methodologies are different, but commonly prices are done in groups.  As such, depending on how you generate the pricing in the ERP, you may change the price for just Tom’s Customer Code (399383) or you may change the pricing for the entire ‘group’ that Tom is a part of.  What you change and whether or not you make changes for a single customer or a group of customers or items is outside the scope of this document and often a factor of other business decisions.

Anytime you have a question about a pricing-related item, the WebAlliance support team requires several pieces of specific data.

• The Customer Code
• The Part Number
• The Location Id of the user seeing the price
• The pricing you expect to see
• The pricing you actually see online

These data points are key because pricing in all ERPs cannot be checked without this information.  For instance, if you don’t include a Customer Code, there is no way to ask the ERP for a price because pricing is specific to the Customer Code in question.  As such, any support requests around pricing that don’t include these details will be unable to be answered until the details are provided.

If your ERP supports such a function, we recommend first checking pricing using your Sales Pricing Inquiry function in your ERP.  Enter the Customer Code, Part Number, and Location ID to see what pricing your ERP is generating for the item and customer.  The pricing you see here is what the user will see if they are attached to this Customer Code and looking at this item at the location.  If it isn’t what you expect, then you should adjust your ERP system to get the pricing you expect.