You have set up your strategy tree and tested some products to see if the strategies you have built are working as expected—that is great! You have checked that the products follow the right path, follow the right set of competitors, and get the right price formulas—you are almost there! There are more things to check before you can be sure that your pricing is fullproof. What are they? Please continue reading.
Check 1: Investigating failed calculation products
What is failed calculation and where can you find those products with failed calculations?
There are many reasons why a product can be part of a failed calculation. The top 3 most common reasons are:
A. There are conflicting values in the safety rules, meaning the maximum price is lower than the minimum price. Omnia then considers this an error and refuses to continue with the price calculationThe error message usually says: “Can’t modify max price to X since it violates the current boundaryPriceBoundary (Y,1000000.00)” where X is a lower value than Y.
B. The values of one of the fields used in the price formulas or safety rule are 0 or empty. In Omnia, we believe that there should be no 0 price, hence, the range of prices that we accept is 0.01 until 1,000,000The error message usually says: “Can’t modify min price 0E-10 since it violates the current boundaryPriceBoundary (0.01,1000000.00)”
C. These fields/ tags you use in your pricing strategies are no longer available in Omnia. This can happen when you accidentally delete some of the fields in the import mapping that are still being used in the strategy tree.
Check if you have failed calculation products in Pricing Strategy Tab and if there is none, you have no issues and can proceed to the next checks but if not, you can download the report that includes the products with failed calculations and the reason for it, like below:
Downloaded price calculation report:
Why is it important to check failed calculations products?
It is because if products are part of failed calculations, Omnia does not reprice these products and they end up getting 0 price advice/ price recommendations in the reports.
As a next step, you can correct the wrong data or if there is nothing you can do or you are fine with these products not having new price advice/ recommendations, I would highly recommend to put a filter in your price advice report to exclude products with price advice of lower or equal to 0.01 such as below:
Check 2: Finding the pricing strategy loophole
How can you check the effectiveness of your pricing strategy tree? Is it covering your whole assortments or are you still missing strategies to cover some different cases? You can find more of this on the Price Recommendation page as can be seen below:
If total products and total price recommendations are not the same, that means that some products do not go through any of the branches in the pricing tree or they are part of the failed calculation products. Now that we have covered the failed calculation products, how can we tackle the other issue which is products leaving the tree without price advice?
Firstly, you should check the “Start” default setting. You can find this on Pricing Strategy tab and go to the default setting as can be seen below:
If this is set at “Only if at least one offer is found”, then most likely this is not an issue. It is because this setting controls when the “price formula” node is carried out. If there are no offers, the all “price formula”, yellow node/ box in the strategy tree will not be applicable and hence, there will be no price advice. Therefore it is to be expected that you will see different numbers in the product imported vs products with price advice/ price recommendations.
However, if it is set to “Always Recommend Price” then, it is important to find out which products do not have price advice. You can find out which are these products by making a report with the fields below, feel free to add more fields such as Top Categories or Brands if needed:
After that you can filter this report to only include the products with price advice is 0
Once you run this report, you will have the list of products with no price advice which means that these products kept going down the tree but never successfully went through any of the branches, hence leaving the tree with no price advice (price advice = 0).
Once you analyze which products these are, the next step is to fix this issue. There are 2 things that you can do:
A. You can add more strategy branches to the tree that will be responsible for these products or if you do not wish to reprice these products, meaning that you would like the rest of the products that did not manage to go through any of the above strategy branches in the tree to have a certain price such as keep selling price or RRP, then you can simply add the node such as below to the very end of the tree. This way you ensure that all products in your assortment will at least have a price advice that is the same as their current selling price or RRP if you change the tag to RRP.
I hope this helps in your final strategy checking so that you do not miss out on some products or end up getting unexpected 0 price advices in your price advice reports. If you still have any questions or need further assistance in solving your pricing issues, please contact our customer service or your respective CSMs for additional help.