Pricing rules guide

This guide explains the 8 rule types behind Dynamic Pricing for the people who own the pricing decisions - category managers, pricing analysts, commercial leads. For each rule: what it does in plain language, the business value, every parameter, and a worked example.

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How the pricing agent thinks

Four ideas explain everything else. Rules don’t fight each other - each one narrows a price corridor, and the final price is picked from what’s left. When a rule’s corridor doesn’t overlap what’s left, the rule is violated. With the default fallback (Follow priority) it’s flagged and the calculation continues; with Return error the row halts instead. Violations are information, not failures - they show you where two rules encode conflicting intent.

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The 8 rule types

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1. Fixed Price - lock a price exactly where it is

Locks every matching row to its current price. No later rule can move it. Why you’d use it: some prices aren’t the algorithm’s to change - items on a printed flyer, prices agreed with a supplier, regulated SKUs, manually approved prices. Fixed Price lets you automate the rest of the assortment with full confidence these stay put. Example - grocery. The weekly flyer advertises private-label olive oil at €6.99. Competitors sell at €7.49 and your margin rule would push the price up - but the flyer is printed. Fixed Price · Priority 1 · Conditions: on_promo IS TRUE keeps every promo SKU exactly where it is while the rest of the category reprices normally. Later rules that target these rows will show as violated - that’s the audit trail telling you the lock won.

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2. Price Change Limit - guardrails on movement

Caps how far other rules can move a price (Maximum), or forbids changes smaller than a threshold (Minimum - the “dead zone”). Why you’d use it: price stability is customer trust. A shopper who saw €49.99 yesterday and €64.99 today feels cheated, and repricing thousands of SKUs by two cents creates operational noise for nothing. Change limits keep automation inside boundaries your commercial team can defend. Example - electronics. A 55” TV sells at €499. Competitor matching runs daily, but a rival’s flash sale shouldn’t drag your price off a cliff overnight. Maximum · Increase 5% · Decrease 5% keeps today’s price inside €474.05 - €523.95; if the market really moved, the price walks there over several runs. A second rule, Minimum · Absolute 0.10, tells the agent not to bother with changes under 10 cents.

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3. Price Change - actively move prices

Adjusts matching prices by a percent, a fixed amount, or a value read from another column. The adjustment is always computed from the current price (the base), never from what earlier rules produced - so stacked rules stay predictable. Why you’d use it: markdowns, cost pass-throughs, and campaigns without a spreadsheet - one rule, thousands of rows, fully auditable. Example - fashion. End of summer: everything tagged season = SS26 with more than 12 weeks of stock cover goes 20% off. Percent · -20 · Conditions: season = SS26 AND stock_cover_weeks > 12 takes the €59.00 linen shirt to €47.20 and the €89.00 midi dress to €71.20. Pair it with a Margin Rule so no markdown cuts through the floor, and Price Rounding to land on .95 endings.

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4. Price Match - position against a reference

Aligns your price to a reference column - typically a competitor price, but any numeric column works. Equals matches it exactly; Between defines a positioning band around it. Why you’d use it: on the key-value items that shape your price image, “never more than 3% above the cheapest competitor” is worth more than any across-the-board discount - shoppers judge the whole store by those SKUs. The band keeps you competitive without following every competitor move to the cent. Example - electronics. Your KVI list must track the market. The cheapest competitor sells the bestselling coffee machine at €179.00. Between · From 2 · To 3 · Conditions: role = KVI gives a corridor of €175.42 - €184.37. Your current €189.00 sits above the band, so the agent pulls it to €184.37 - and rounding lands it on €183.99.

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5. Sync Prices - one price for the whole family

Forces all rows sharing a value in a group column to end at one identical final price. Why you’d use it: nothing erodes trust faster than the strawberry yogurt costing more than the vanilla next to it, or the same t-shirt priced differently per color. Variant families are also where manual pricing errors hide. Sync makes consistency automatic. The shared price is chosen by a cascade: the mode if two or more members already share a current price, otherwise the highest-selling member’s price (when a sales_units column exists), otherwise the median. If other rules leave the group’s corridors only partly overlapping, the engine drops outlier SKUs from the sync and prices them individually rather than breaking the whole group. Example - grocery. Six flavors of own-brand 150g yogurt drifted apart over months of one-off edits: four at €1.19, one at €1.15, one at €1.29. Sync Prices · Group Column: product_line finds the mode - €1.19 - and all six flavors land there in one run.

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6. Margin Rule - protect profitability

Constrains price from cost via a margin or markup target - exactly, or as a range. Usually the non-negotiable floor under everything else. Why you’d use it: competitor matching and markdowns are only safe when something guarantees you’re still making money. A margin floor means the agent can chase the market on Monday and you can still explain the P&L on Friday. The boundary math: margin percent gives cost / (1 - T), markup percent gives cost * (1 + T), absolute gives cost + value (with T = value / 100). Example - pet supplies. Premium dog food costs €18.00 a bag; category policy is margin between 25% and 45%. That’s a corridor of €24.00 - €32.73. Competitor matching can roam inside the band - but a rival at €22.99 won’t drag you below €24.00; the match rule shows as violated and the floor holds.

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7. Price Rounding - land on the endings customers expect

Forces final prices onto allowed endings - .99, .95, whole euros, whatever your price image calls for. Rounding is special: it always runs after every other rule, regardless of its position in the priority list. Why you’d use it: a shelf full of €12.37 and €8.42 quietly damages price perception. Charm endings are among the best-documented effects in retail, and different endings can signal different things - .99 for value lines, clean numbers for premium. Rounding makes automated prices look deliberately set by a merchant. Example - home & DIY. Two rounding rules split the assortment: under €100, Pattern *.99, *.95 · Closest turns a computed €12.78 into €12.95; from €100 up, Pattern *9.00 · Down turns €342.60 into €339.00. Budget items get charm endings; big-ticket items get clean merchant numbers.

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8. Price Relations - keep a deliberate price ladder

Where Sync makes a group identical, Price Relations keeps a group deliberately different - maintaining a structured gap between members, on the shelf price or on unit price (per kg / per litre). Why you’d use it: good-better-best only works if the gaps tell the story - if “better” creeps within 50 cents of “best”, the ladder collapses. Same for pack architecture: the 1kg bag must beat the 500g bag per kilo, always. Price Relations encodes that merchandising logic so no individual reprice can break it. Example - fashion. A t-shirt wall runs good-better-best, anchored by the premium pima tee at €39.90. One by one · Percent 25 · Anchor: Highest priced steps the ladder to €29.93 and €22.44; rounding polishes those to €29.95 and €22.45. When the anchor moves - a markdown, a cost change - the whole ladder follows automatically.

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One SKU through four rules

Real strategies stack rules. A 55” TV - current price €499.00, cost €380.00, cheapest competitor €479.00 - through a typical electronics strategy: The point in the feasible range closest to the current €499 is the upper edge, €493.37; rounding takes it to the nearest allowed ending inside the range, €492.99. Result: €6 sharper than yesterday, within 3% of the cheapest competitor, 22.9% margin, a shelf-friendly ending - and every step visible in the Price Analysis panel.

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Tips for building strategies

• Order by how negotiable a rule is. Locks first (Fixed Price), then hard constraints (Margin floor, Change Limit), then targets (Price Match, Price Change, Sync, Relations). Rounding can sit anywhere - it always runs last.
• Test on the sample first. Run against Sample 10 Rows (Parameters tab) and check the Price Analysis panel on a few rows before committing to the full dataset.
• Violations are information. Recurring violations usually mean two rules encode conflicting intent. Reserve Return error for true red lines.
• Use Conditions generously. The same Margin Rule with different Conditions becomes a per-category margin policy; in SKU-Store view, store-attribute conditions give you country- or channel-specific strategies.
• Set Priority explicitly. When a result surprises you, check the Priority numbers before anything else.

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Related

• Dynamic Pricing - full technical reference for the rules engine
• Price Optimization - model-recommended prices, with rules as guardrails
• Review and approve price changes
• Agents overview