Set and maintain prices

Scale and volume prices

Quantity price breaks — how the ladder resolves, and how to generate one without typing rungs by hand.

Staffelpreise: €19.90 from 1, €17.50 from 10, €14.00 from 50. They are one of the few pricing devices that raise order value without anyone selling, and they are cheap to maintain once you know how the ladder is stored.

How a ladder is stored

There is no separate tier object. A ladder is several entries for the same item in the same price list, differing only in From quantity:

SKU	From quantity	Unit price
`4711-A`	`1`	`19.90`
`4711-A`	`10`	`17.50`
`4711-A`	`50`	`14.00`

At resolution, the highest rung at or below the ordered quantity wins. Order 12 and you pay €17.50 each. Order 9 and you pay €19.90 each. There is no interpolation and no partial-tier arithmetic.

Two consequences:

The ladder lives inside one list. A contract list with its own ladder for an article replaces the standard ladder entirely for that customer; the two do not merge. If a customer list prices 4711-A only at quantity 1, that customer has no scale prices for that article, even though your standard list has three rungs.
A rung at quantity 1 is required. Without it, small orders resolve to no price at all. Every ladder starts at 1.

Add rungs by hand

For one article:

Go to Order Management › Prices › Price lists, open the list and find the article in the Price entries grid.
Add another entry for the same SKU with a higher From quantity and a lower unit price.
Repeat for each rung.

Entries above quantity 1 are marked with a tier chip in the grid, so a ladder is visible at a glance.

Generate a ladder

For a full ladder, use the Tier ladder action on a price entry (Order Management › Prices › Price entries, row action). It builds the whole set in one step:

Name the item by SKU or product id.
Price at the first tier: your quantity-1 price, e.g. 19.90.
Tiers (from quantity): comma-separated, e.g. 1, 10, 50.
Discount per tier (%): compounded. 5 on a base of 19.90 gives 19.90 / 18.91 / 17.96.
Unit: e.g. PCE.
Round results to: an ending you would print. Leave empty to use your tenant default; see Rounding, defaults and resolution rules.
Replace this item's tiers: on by default, which replaces whatever the list already holds for the item. Turn it off only if you know you are adding alongside existing rungs.
Generate.

Replace does what it says. With it on, the ladder you generate becomes the item's only ladder in that list, including an item whose rungs somebody negotiated. Check what is there before generating over a customer list.

Designing rungs that do something

The rungs matter more than the mechanism.

Make the break worth changing behaviour for. A ladder of €19.90 / €19.50 / €19.20 gives away margin on orders that would have happened anyway. If the second rung does not make a buyer round their order up, it is a discount with extra steps.

Put the breaks on real packaging quantities. If the article ships in boxes of 25, the rungs are 25 and 100, not 20 and 75. Buyers order in packs; a rung between packs is unreachable.

Three rungs is usually enough. Five gives buyers arithmetic to do and you five prices per article to maintain across every list.

Reflect your actual cost curve. The saving on an order of 50 is real: one pick, one pack, one line on one invoice instead of fifty. Rungs that mirror that are defensible in a margin discussion. Rungs that were guessed are not.

Scale prices in the storefront

The storefront receives the whole ladder, not only the rung that applies, which is what makes a tier table on the product page possible. That table is what raises order value: a buyer who sees "from 50: €14.00" next to their quantity field frequently changes the quantity themselves.

If your product pages show only the price for quantity 1, the ladder is doing half its job. Raise it with whoever maintains your storefront.

What to check

Filter Order Management › Prices › Price entries by the SKU. You should see the full ladder, sorted by quantity, with prices that descend.
No two rungs share the same From quantity in the same list. Duplicate rungs are ambiguous and one of them is dead.
A rung exists at quantity 1.
Put the article in a test cart at a quantity directly below and directly above a break. The price should change at exactly the quantity you set, not one either side.

Time-limited and on-request prices — prices with an end date.
Import prices in bulk — ladders across thousands of articles.

Edit this page

Contract prices

Give one account the prices you negotiated, without copying your catalogue and without leaking them to anyone else.

Time-limited prices

Campaign prices that end by themselves, project prices with a term, and articles that carry no published price at all.