Glossary of terms#

Rule application#

(sometimes also feed regeneration, project regeneration)

This is the process during which pricing is run, that is, the output price of products is calculated. It can be run manually right in the Mergado Editor, and it also runs automatically several times a day (the specific interval depends on Mergado’s algorithm). Mergado also lets you set a manual interval up to 5 times a day in defined time slots (we recommend this if you need a better estimate of when pricing will run). Once rule application is complete, you’ll then have new output prices in the feed from Mergado, and Pricing Fox also triggers regeneration of the universal XML and API connectors.

Filter#

(sometimes also product filter, saved filter)

These are filters saved directly from the Pricing Fox app. On the Products page you can search for products by a variety of criteria and then save and name this filter. If you want to use a product filter within a pricing rule, we don’t recommend using filters from the Pricing group, because they’ll always be one rule application behind (first the products are filtered and only then is the new pricing calculated).

Limits#

Pricing Fox offers a wide range of options for keeping your output price within the desired bounds. Specifically, these are the following limits:

• Restriction by purchase price – if you have the purchase price in your feed, this will be the most frequently used option for you. In this section you can set the desired minimum margin or markup. In whole CZK or in percentages. For enthusiasts, there’s also the option to set a maximum margin or markup in the same way.

• Restriction by input price – if you don’t have purchase prices, here you can choose the highest (or lowest) possible discount or price increase for a product. Again, you can specify whether you want the limit in percentages or CZK.

• Restriction of the output price - if you want to be sure the final price won’t exceed a certain fixed threshold after all, this will be the place for you. It’s always an absolute value that all products in the rule must not exceed or fall below.

You may, but don’t have to, use any of these limits. The individual types of restriction can also be combined to achieve the pricing result you want. In the app you can also decide what should happen to products that would exceed one of the set bounds – either the price can be adjusted by the limit, or we can pass the product on and not touch it in the selected rule.

Mergado#

Mergado is an advanced editor of product feeds from your online store. You can use it for simple manual edits of your product data, or make use of advanced apps that will polish your assortment to perfection. One of them is Pricing Fox, with which you’ll have the whole matter of pricing in your store down to a fine art. Within Mergado you can, among other things, segment your assortment using queries and edit data using rules.

Mergado rule#

These are all the rules you have created in Mergado. In most cases these are your manual rules, thanks to which you can edit product data in a simple way, or application rules that are tied to one of your apps (e.g. Pricing Fox). As with pricing rules, their order matters. Pricing Fox as such creates one rule in Mergado, which you can then move to any position among your existing rules in the Mergado interface. Thanks to this property you can edit both the data before it enters Pricing Fox, and further process the elements that the pricing engine fills in directly.

Purchase price#

(sometimes also acquisition price)

If you have a product’s purchase price in your online store, don’t be afraid to send it to Pricing Fox. Based on it, the engine can calculate and respect product margins that can bring you higher profit. What’s more, we look after your purchase prices like the apple of our eye and don’t write them anywhere unless you explicitly want us to (for example, in an export to your accounting system). If you don’t have purchase prices or aren’t interested in margins, that’s fine – the engine will work without them too, you’ll just miss out on some of the more advanced options.

Rules#

(sometimes also list of rules)

A page in the Pricing Fox app on which you’ll find all the pricing rules you’ve created. It’s an ordered list, where rules higher up have a higher priority – meaning that products that fall into the first rule and match its settings no longer proceed to the following rules. In each rule you can set what should happen to products that don’t match the settings – either the product can end up with no price change, or it can drop through to the next rule in order.

Rule#

(sometimes also pricing rule, repricing rule)

If you want to change the prices of your products, this will be the main hub of the app for you. In a rule you set which products should enter it (using a query or a filter) and what new price you want to calculate for them. Each product passes through the rule separately, and they don’t affect one another in any way. In a rule you always set which reference price the engine should find for each product and how to work with it further. You can further modify the reference price in the rule with a calculation, limits, and rounding. If a product passes through the rule without problems, the rule then sets its output price for each product and marks it as repriced. Products for which no reference price is found, or which exceed a set limit, can be sent to the next rule. You can have an unlimited number of rules set up within a single online store, and use them, for example, to segment your assortment by price, manufacturer, or any other criterion. Several rules can even have the same query or filter set – in that case it always holds that a product passes through the rules in sequence (from the top of the list of rules), and if it gets repriced, it no longer continues to the following rules.

Pricing Fox#

This is a smart extension of the Mergado system that helps you manage and control the pricing of your online store. For more information we recommend visiting our summary article How Pricing Fox works and also taking a look at everything it can help you with.

Product feed#

(sometimes also XML feed)

A product feed is a data file with information about the goods you sell. Most online store solutions provide this file at a fixed URL, which you can use directly as the input feed in Mergado. You’ll find more information on how to work with feeds and use them to improve your online store on the Mergado website.

Reference price#

In the Pricing Fox app, by reference price we mean the price from which the new price is to be calculated. In most cases it isn’t the input price (i.e. your price from the feed), but the price of a selected competitor or group of competitors. Examples:

• You target the first position on a price comparison site - then the reference price is that of the store in this position. If your offer is already in this position, we can’t use it (to avoid a repricing spiral), so Pricing Fox won’t work with any reference price and will either let the product drop through to the next rule or keep its original price (depending on the other rule settings).

• You want the lowest price on the product card from verified stores – in that case we find all the stores on the card that have Verified by Customers (except yours) and pick the minimum price from them. That will then be marked as the reference price.

• You want to be CZK 1 cheaper than the average price in bidding – if you set targeting to all positions in bidding and then choose the average price, the reference price becomes the calculated average price. So it doesn’t have to be the price of one specific store.

From the reference price you can then subtract or add the desired amount in CZK, EUR, or percentages. This calculated price is then sent to the next steps of the engine, in which it can be adjusted according to limits or rounding. If we can’t find any reference price, you can decide in the rule settings what should happen to the product next – either we won’t change the price at all (we set the input price as the output), or we send the product to the next rule.

Input price#

(sometimes also original price, old price)

By input price we mean your product price, which we read from the feed. In the Pricing Fox settings you can choose which Mergado element we read it from. In most cases this price isn’t used to calculate the product’s new price, but you can use it to restrict the maximum change (discount or price increase). Across the whole app we also show this price as the default price and use it to calculate, among other things, the difference against the output price, which you can send back to Mergado or export.

Output price#

(sometimes also new price, final price)

The most important term in Pricing Fox and in pricing in general. The output price is the result of the entire repricing process (if the price can be adjusted in the rule), or the input price is simply copied into it. In any case, this is the price we’ll send to the output feed (in the Mergado connection settings you can adjust which element), the universal export, or the API connector. This price is also used to calculate the margin, if we find the product’s purchase price.

Query#

(sometimes also Mergado query)

This is a filter created in the Mergado app, which you can use to segment products in the Pricing Fox app as well. So if you already use Mergado as your main tool, you can take advantage of its advanced product filtering options within repricing rules.

Calculated price#

Once we find the reference price in a repricing rule, we can make further changes to it. The most common one will be lowering or raising it, or you can, for example, multiply it by a fixed coefficient. It always depends on your requirements and what you set in the rule. The calculated price then continues through the engine into limit restriction.