Companies face challenges in providing consistent promotional pricing across sales channels.
In the omnichannel business, companies face a challenge because the different sales channel applications (for example Web, POS, SAP S/4HANA Sales Order) have different price calculation functionalities, such as:
- Multiple repositories where prices are kept and persisted differently.
- Different price calculation logics for different sales channels.
- Complex offers / pricing are not fully and consistently supported by all relevant sales channels.
This leads to:
- High development and test efforts when introducing new promotional rules.
- Long time to market for new promotional rules designed by Marketers.
- No consistent pricing across all sales channels.
- Unhappy customers because of wrong promotional prices at checkout ("promotion is a promise to a customer".)
- Companies are losing money (negative impact on margin) because of incorrect prices.
Today's Situation: A Quick Overview
To view the challenge in terms of a sample IT landscape, a company can have multiple systems in place, such as:
- SAP ERP systems.
- Commerce Cloud solutions.
- CRM solutions.
- POS systems.
Some customers even told us that they have a POS system from multiple vendors in place, which increases even more the complexity for them.
Each solution has its own price repository and its own price calculation logic, which can lead to different prices in the different sales channels.
To achieve a consistent promotional pricing, when a new promotional rule is introduced, it must be manually implemented in each sales channel. This implementation requires a huge effort and takes a long time. As it's a manual process, consistency is not assured.