Best prior price Closed beta

Best prior price is a feature that calculates the lowest prior price for an item from the price history you provide to Talon.One. This feature is intended to support you in your obligations under Article 6a of the European Union's Omnibus Directive. These price transparency regulations generally require retailers to display the lowest price of an item in a preceding period of 30 days or more alongside any sale price they advertise.

You can use this feature when using strikethrough pricing in your campaigns. Talon.One calculates the best prior price based on the data you input.

Legal compliance

Talon.One makes no representation as to compliance with any price transparency regulation and does not offer legal advice regarding the same. Talon.One provides its users with a tool to create a price history for an item and calculate a best prior price value from the price history collected by or provided to Talon.One. As a Talon.One user, you are responsible for the configuration of these tools and for compliance with any regulations that apply.

For additional support and information, contact your Customer Success Manager.

Prerequisites

To calculate the best prior price for an item, ensure the following:

• You have connected a cart item catalog to your Application.
• You have set up a campaign with strikethrough rules.
• The closed beta best prior price feature is enabled for your Application. To access this feature, contact your Customer Success Manager.

Note

Promotional rules are not taken into account when creating a price history.

Price history

Talon.One calculates the best prior price for an item from the price history you provide through campaigns and price adjustments.

The price history is a collection of price changes for an item over time. Each price change logged in an item's price history is called a price record.

Talon.One keeps a price history for every item in a cart item catalog. Each time an item's price changes, Talon.One adds a new price record to its price history.

A price record can result from either of the following:

• A price adjustment, whether set directly or synced from your system through a catalog update.
• A strikethrough pricing campaign that includes discount effects. Custom effects are not considered.

Note

Any custom prices set in the cartItems object in Update customer session endpoint requests are not recorded in an item's price history.

Items without a price

A cart item is not required to have a base price or a price adjustment. If neither is set, Talon.One does not consider the item to be for sale, and no price record is created. The base price refers to the base price value in the catalog, which is the regular price of the item.

Price adjustments

Price adjustments are specific price values assigned to a cart item. They work in conjunction with price types, which are named categories of price for an individual item in a cart item catalog.

A price adjustment lets you sync an item's price from an external pricing engine to Talon.One through the Sync cart item catalog endpoint. You can sync several concurrent prices for the same item, with each price targeting a distinct audience. For example:

Price type	Price adjustment	Audience
Base price	€100	All customers
Sale price	€80	All customers
Member price	€70	Members only
VIP price	€65	VIPs only

When several prices overlap for the same audience, the lowest price always wins. In the example above, members have access to the base, sale, and member prices, but they can purchase the item at the member price.

Strikethrough pricing campaigns

A strikethrough pricing campaign can further reduce the price of an item. When a strikethrough pricing campaign runs, Talon.One sends a notification to a URL you configure. This notification contains the final price information for the item in the catalog, which is the price to display for the item on your ecommerce website.

Factors that affect price history

The following settings directly influence the price history, and therefore the best prior price calculated for an item:

• Context ID: When you add a price adjustment or create a strikethrough pricing campaign, provide a context ID to relate the adjustment to a specific sales event. This ID can be new or can come from your system.

  Adding a context ID is important for handling progressive price reductions, where the item's price is lowered further during the same sales event, for example, €100 → €80 → €60.

  Note

  Talon.One logs the context ID when it creates a price record, but the context ID itself is only relevant when price history is retrieved, not when it is created.

• Audience: When you create a price type, add a price adjustment, or use strikethrough pricing in a campaign, you can define which audience can access the price.

How Talon.One creates the price history for an item

Talon.One creates a new price record for an item when its price changes. This happens when you do the following:

• Use the Sync a catalog endpoint to provide new pricing information for an item in one of the following ways:

  • Update the base price by using the PATCH sync action type.
  • Assign a price adjustment to the item using the ADD_PRICE_ADJUSTMENT sync action type.

• Create or update a campaign with strikethrough rules that target the item.

The Rule Engine then evaluates any strikethrough pricing campaigns in your Application that contain the item and triggers any discount effects that apply.

Talon.One then logs a price record for each audience, depending on the scenario:

• No discount effect applies to the item: Talon.One records the lowest price adjustment. If there are no price adjustments, Talon.One records the item's base price.
• A campaign applies a discount effect to the item: Talon.One records the lowest applicable price. This is the price adjustment value or, if none exists, the base price. It sums the value of every discount effect that applies to that audience, and subtracts the total from the lowest applicable price. The resulting value is the price record.
• A campaign applies a custom effect to the item: Talon.One ignores custom effects entirely. They do not affect price history.

Since a price adjustment and a strikethrough pricing campaign are each optional, and can occur in any combination, the following permutations are possible:

Price adjustment	Strikethrough pricing campaign	Price record logged in price history
No	No	The item's base price.
Yes	No	The price adjustment value for each audience.
No	Yes	The base price minus the sum of the campaign's discount effects.
Yes	Yes	The price adjustment value minus the sum of the campaign's discount effects.

Collectively, the price records for an item make up its price history.

Retrieve the best prior price for an item

To retrieve the best prior price for an item, use the Fetch best prior price endpoint. Send a request with the item SKU and a defined timeframe to return a single best prior price value.

Best prior price timeframe selection

The best prior price Talon.One selects is based on when the current price began.

When you call the Fetch best prior price endpoint, you select a timeframe for retrieving an item's price records using the timeframeEndDateType property. This property determines which price records Talon.One takes into account when calculating best prior price.

Select one of the following timeframe values:

• strict: Talon.One calculates the best prior price according to the timeframeEndDate values you set.
• price: Based on when the price value changes. Talon.One calculates the best prior price using the price records prior to the start of the current price value.
• sale: Based on a sales event. Talon.One calculates the best prior price using the price records prior to the start of the current sales event. It includes price records that are in the same sales event and have the same contextId. You can select this value in the case of a progressive price reduction, where the item's price is lowered further during the same sales event.

Note

If there are any increases in price within a single sales event, a new sales event begins.

Example

Consider an item with the following price history, where each price is reduced further within a period. Let's assume today is July 3 and we need the best prior price for the previous 30 days.

Price	Context ID	Price first available
€100	(none)	June 1
€80	summer-sale	June 15
€70	summer-sale	July 1

The current price is €70. Depending on the timeframe selection value, the best prior price Talon.One returns is different:

• strict: The timeframe ends at the timeframeEndDate value you set, regardless of price or context ID changes. Talon.One returns the lowest price recorded in a specified number of days before that date, which is either €100, €80, or €70, depending on when the timeframeEndDate falls.
• price: Since €70 is a new price value, the timeframe starts when €70 began, and Talon.One starts looking backwards from July 1. The previous price records for the 30-day period are €100 and €80. Talon.One returns €80 as the best prior price, since it is the lowest price in that period.
• sale: Because €80 and €70 share the context ID, summer-sale, Talon.One views them as the same sale event. The timeframe starts when the price record for summer-sale began at €80, so it looks back from June 15 and returns €100 as the best prior price.

Retrieve the price history for an item

You can use the Get summary of price history endpoint to retrieve all the price records Talon.One has logged for an item over a given period. This endpoint is useful for auditing purposes and for ensuring that evaluation produced correct price records.

Also, since Talon.One logs a separate price record per audience, you can inspect the target field on each entry, for example, to compare the price history of a member price compared to a base price.

Related pages

• Set up price types
• Strikethrough pricing
• Manage cart item catalogs