The Pricing Engine: A new way to manage pricing & promotions

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of our new core capability, the Pricing Engine. The Pricing Engine consolidates your pricing and promotion workflows in one simple interface, and acts as a source of truth for strikethrough pricing – as well as all your other promotions.

In this blog post, we’ll cover:

More questions, or keen to see the Pricing Engine in action? Reach out to our team here to learn more.

When speaking to our retail clients about how they currently manage their pricing and promotions strategy - specifically when it comes to implementing strikethrough pricing - we saw a clear need to simplify the setup and develop a more streamlined approach.
Strikethrough pricing is a sales strategy where the price of a product is reduced from its original price to drive sales. Often, the old price is presented in crossed-out format on a retailer’s website, which is called markdown or strikethrough pricing. At the moment, many retailers struggle with convoluted approaches to run basic strikethrough pricing on site. All clients we spoke with mentioned similar pain points: current workflows are painful, piecemeal, manual, and error-prone, and mostly come down to spreadsheet uploads across multiple platforms.

We built the Pricing Engine to address these challenges: no more manual price tracking in Excel, but a modern tool to manage your pricing and promotions strategy in real-time. It’s important to clarify that the Pricing Engine is not a source of truth for your base price – that remains with your PIM and ERP. Instead, it serves as the connective tissue between the systems that generate and use customer, inventory, and session data, and makes markdown pricing easier to manage than ever before. 

The Pricing Engine works by consolidating pricing and promotion workflows into one easy interface. Your pricing strategy will still be based on the usual price determinants, but by integrating with Talon.One, you’ll be able to push prices from your PIM to the Pricing Engine to more seamlessly manage strikethrough pricing, product labeling and EU best price compliance. 

With the Pricing Engine, users can sync their product catalog with Talon.One to build automated strikethrough campaigns, and harmonize them with their other personalization and loyalty initiatives. Below is an example of what this might look like within Talon.One’s Rule Builder, and how it translates to a retailer’s webshop. 

With the Pricing Engine, users can also set-up fully customizable product labeling. Retailers can use product labeling to further highlight an offer or specific saving - like in the “save 25%” example below. 

Retailers can also use product labeling to spotlight loyalty program benefits and member prices. This helps showcase the value of your loyalty program and drive uptake by displaying member pricing and offers.

Sync real time catalog updates to better manage stock, and target different products for different campaigns. Talon.One then automatically updates this data in real time whenever your promotions or product catalog change.

The EU Omnibus Directive requires businesses to provide clear and accurate pricing information to consumers for goods sold in the European Union. Part of the regulation requires retailers to indicate an item’s lowest price in the last 30 days when reducing it - as in the example below.

Now that we’ve looked at the use cases, how does the Pricing Engine work in practice? As a first step, you will need to synchronize your inventory with Talon.One using cart item catalogs. From there, to implement markdown pricing setup:

The Pricing Engine is now available in the Talon.One platform. For existing customers who would like to learn more about the Pricing Engine and its use cases, please reach out to your Account Manager or Customer Success Manager for more details. Alternatively, reach out to our Sales team here.