Use the Price Engine to Generate Public Pricing for Your Website

The public pricing feature addresses the need to display pricing to public users while maintaining system performance. Traditionally, static prices stored on product or SKU records are used for public display to ensure fast site performance when crawlers visit or during traffic spikes, while the dynamic price engine is only engaged when users log in. This new feature combines both approaches by using the price engine to calculate prices and then storing them as static values.

Our feature runs the price engine automatically every night to recalculate prices for all products based on specified price records designated for public pricing. The calculated values are then saved as static prices on product records. This process ensures that public pricing remains current without requiring manual updates, while maintaining the performance benefits of static pricing when the site experiences high traffic or crawler activity.

Configuration

Several system settings need to be configured to implement this feature:

• enablePublicPricing: This setting must be activated to display public pricing.
• calculatePublicPrice: This setting enables the nightly job that recalculates all the public prices.
• publicPriceCompanyCode: This specifies which company code to use when calculating public pricing.
• publicPriceAlternateField: This is needed if using a SKU list price for the default price field and for products that are not in your ERP.

Implementation

Once configured, the daily interval job runs automatically (typically at midnight) to calculate all prices according to the settings.

Additional Capabilities

The feature also supports quantity breaks, calculating and stacking them appropriately for products where this is applicable. This ensures that even complex pricing structures can be maintained automatically for public display.