Home » Forums » Discussions » E-Business and E-Commerce - General Discussion
» Sliding Scale option in Volume Discounts feature

Sliding Scale option in Volume Discounts feature

Submitted by Fookes on 16 Mar 2010

I emailed the following question to Vendors Support 5 days ago but have not received any reply so far. Perhaps a Plimus staff member here would be kind enough to answer it?

We're trying to set up volume discounts for a new version of one of our products. I was experimenting with the Sliding Scale feature in the hope that it would create a progressive price curve. Unfortunately, I'm getting very unpredictable results. I could not find any documentation on Sliding Scales. Could you explain how it is supposed to work? What are the mathematics behind it?

Thanks!
Eric Fookes

‹ website help needed No refunds allowed. ›

Sliding Scale explanation

Submitted by Max S. on 17 Mar 2010.

Hi Eric,

When you set a sliding scale volume discount on a contract-id, every unit's price would be calculated with a discount occurding to it's "position" on the sliding scale, as opposed to having an absolute discount on all the units if a customer chooses a certain amount of units.

For example, let's take a look at this volume discount:

1-5 0% (original price 1000$)
6-10 10%
11-20 50%

For the first 5 products cost would not change.

If the customer chooses 6 units, he'll get 5900$, if he chooses 7 he'll get a price of 6800$ (the original price for the first 5 units do not change as more units are added.)

On 11 he'll get 5*1000+5*900+1*500=9000$

For the price of a single unit in such cases you'll have to divide the total cost by the amount of units, for instance if you buy 11 units with the previous volume discount setup, each unit would cost 818.18$. Try looking at the total cost and you should see how it works.

In regards to the support ticket you had opened, please let us know what the number is so we can follow up on it for you.

Thanks for your reply Max.

Submitted by Fookes on 17 Mar 2010.

Thanks for your reply Max. Shame this information isn't available as a convenient help popup in the control panel. It's certainly not an obvious feature.

I never received a support ticket (wasn't sure I was meant to get one). All mail from the Plimus domain is whitelisted, so I know it wasn't blocked by my server spam filter.

Support FAQs

Submitted by Derek on 17 Mar 2010.

There's a section about this in the Support FAQs.

Suggest you also take a look there.

Thanks,

Derek, Plimus

Rounding errors produce unpredictable pricing

Submitted by Fookes on 17 Mar 2010.

Now that I understand how the sliding scale feature works, I've done some tests that indeed show the results you explained. But I've noticed inconsistencies in rounding that make the actual price very hard to predict. I create price quotes on my website, so it is important that my price matches the one that Plimus charges.

With small quantities, the price difference varies from identical to a few cents. But with larger quantities the price difference can be much higher. Example: the base product price in my test is $29.95. When I set the quantity to 5001, Plimus gives a price of $12,152.43. Using the same scale in Excel I get $12,136.94.

Is it possible to have a copy of your formula so that I can produce identical results?

--Eric