Customer-Specific Pricing in eCommerce

For an eCommerce business, or any business, customers play a significant role in its success. Personalizing each customer’s experience is key to their satisfaction with your business and their willingness to continue working with you.

Personalizing the eCommerce platform to each customer requires the use of intelligent, automated systems that can learn what customers search for and what they are likely to want, and put this together with what others have bought along with certain items.

For example, if someone has been searching for winter coats, then showing them items relevant to that, such as gloves and scarves, may be helpful to them.

Personalization also includes having the right currency and marketing content for different countries. People in different regions will have different expectations when it comes to ads, so it’s important to adjust and cater to that, as this allows them to better connect with the ads.

Having different price levels for customers or groups, or customer-specific pricing, is also a valuable way to tailor the eCommerce platform to each customer.

Customer-specific pricing is when you set distinct prices for different customers or customer groups.

The prices can be set at the product level or category level, as flat rates or percentage discounts. You can create pricing slabs to promote bulk purchases.

There are several reasons why you might use customer-specific pricing. For example, you might have discounted prices or free shipping for those who pay a subscription for premium membership benefits.

There can also be discounted prices on items that a customer has purchased a certain number of times. There can be products that customers subscribe to so they’re delivered automatically, and those would be discounted as well.

Buying groups often buy things in bulk from group buying platforms, so there may be discounts based on that.

Let’s say one of your customers, we’ll call him Paul, has made more purchases in the last three months than all of your other customers, and you want to reward him for trusting your brand.

You also have a new product coming that won’t be available on discount until the next holiday season.

To reward Paul and encourage him to buy more products from your eCommerce website, you offer this new product at a lower price than it would be for others.

With the customer-specific pricing tool in your eCommerce platform, you can simply activate a discount for Paul, and he’ll see that he has access to your new product at a discounted price.

This will increase his satisfaction of your platform and loyalty to your brand, as people are pleased by unexpected rewards.

With role-based pricing, the main principle is the same. But instead of selecting the customer’s name, you set up the user’s role and the price you want them to see there.

This is where you can set up different prices for subscribers versus non-subscribers, among other differentiations between groups. You choose the user category, create roles (e.g., non-subscribers), and set up your price for them.

Group-Based Pricing

You can also customize prices for a specific group. For this, you’ll create a custom label for the group and assign users to that group.

For example, you might want to give a special discount to the first ten customers who purchased something on your eCommerce platform. To do this, you’ll create a group using the customer-specific pricing tool, and assign each of the ten members to that group.

This is also a good opportunity, especially when first starting out, to promote your eCommerce platform. It might be advantageous for you to run marketing campaigns about how customers will receive discounted prices if they are among the first 50 people to buy something in your platform.

If, later, you want to make changes to the prices or users in a group, or the criteria for a group, you have the access necessary to do that. You can also easily import and export your settings for customers, groups, and roles.

• Quantity-based discounts: Discounts based on the number of products you buy. For example, “buy two, get the third half-off.”
• Personalized shopping page for users: This is a custom catalog with special prices for specific buyers.
• Percentage and Flat Rate Discounts: You can set these up to apply to everyone, or a specific category of users. Customers will pay a certain percentage of the original price or pay the same price per unit no matter how much is purchased, respectively.
• Category-Based Discounts: These are discounts set for specific product categories. They can be set for specific customers, user roles, groups, and/or simply every user. One way in which these discounts are useful is for certain times of the year when demand for particular products increases or decreases.
• Free products: For special customers, you can do a 100 percent discount on special events, such as birthdays. It can also be beneficial to give free samples to customers who want to try out a product before deciding to buy.

These are all processes that can be planned and automated to make your work more efficient. Discounts can also be given for specific circumstances.

For example, when someone buys a towel set, you want them to get a 20 percent discount for lavender soaps. This can be automated, and every customer who buys those towel sets will get a discount on the soaps. You won’t have to worry about doing this manually, which saves time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

Just like anything else, customer-specific pricing has advantages and disadvantages, which are important to go over so you can take the correct actions for your eCommerce business.

A successful business starts with understanding your market and the customers within it. As a result, you’ll build customer trust and satisfaction with your brand and eCommerce platform, which will help your business thrive.