There are multiple ways in which a sale can be triggered to display on the Citrus-Lime Ecommerce platform.
Fundamentally, you can set a threshold within Cloud MT that determines what level of discount is considered a legitimate sale item. This feature is located under the Site Management section of the Cloud MT navigation, titled Site Specific Options.
We cover this in more detail in this article: Cloud MT // How do I control when an item appears as On Sale?
Nonetheless, to make use of that functionality, understanding why and how a sale price is presented is useful for managing your item data successfully.
Items come in two basic forms:
1) Standard Items
2) Matrix Items
Sale pricing for Standard Items
There are two ways to trigger sale pricing for a Standard item on Citrus-Lime Ecommerce.
The first and most obvious way is to set a Sale Price on the item card in Cloud POS and save the changes. These changes will then be updated to the Ecommerce platform and will take effect immediately, subject to caching.
The second way to automatically trigger a sale on the Ecommerce platform is to lower the Price below that of the MSRP. For example, if when setting up an item you set the Price and MSRP identically at 10.00 and then subsequently change the Price to 8.00, you will automatically trigger a sale online.
Similarly, if you set a Web Price below that of the MSRP, you will automatically trigger sale pricing online.
All of this happens regardless of whether you have set the Sale flag on the item card in Cloud POS.
It's worth noting that setting the Sale flag on its own is not enough to trigger sale pricing on Citrus-Lime Ecommerce. A sale will not display when:
1) the Sale flag has been set but the Sale Price is 0.00
2) the Sale flag has been set but the Sale Price is equivalent to the current selling Price (for example, Price = 10.00, Sale Price = 10.00)
Sale pricing for Matrix Items
Matrix items are made up of individual child items — for example, a T-Shirt Matrix Parent might have Small, Medium and Large as its child items. Typically, the price of a matrix item does not change relative to its dimensions, so a T-Shirt priced at 25.00 would be 25.00 regardless of whether it is Small, Medium or Large.
Similarly, if the T-Shirt were placed into sale, all child items would be reduced in a uniform manner. In this scenario, the conditions under which the item displays as a sale item on Citrus-Lime Ecommerce are identical to those for a Standard item.
However, where there is variation of pricing across the child items, things get a little more nuanced.
Variable Matrix Pricing
If one child item is priced differently to the others, this is treated as Variable Matrix Pricing rather than a sale. For example:
T-Shirt
- Small — 25.00
- Medium — 25.00
- Large — 30.00
No sale will be triggered in this case. Ecommerce will simply display the lowest price across all child items with no sale indicator.
If you set a child item's price lower than the others, the same applies — for example:
T-Shirt
- Small — 25.00
- Medium — 25.00
- Large — 20.00
This is still treated as Variable Matrix Pricing and no sale will be triggered. Ecommerce will display the new lowest price with no sale indicator.
However, if a child item's price (or Web Price) drops below the MSRP for that specific child item, sale pricing will display on the Ecommerce site. For example:
T-Shirt — MSRP of 21.00
- Small — 25.00
- Medium — 25.00
- Large — 20.00
In this case, because the Large is priced below its MSRP of 21.00, sale pricing will display on the Ecommerce site. This can be a confusing experience for the customer — the site will show something like "Price 20.00, Was 21.00" even though only the Large is below its MSRP and the item isn't intended to be on sale.
To avoid this, you can set the MSRP for the Matrix item to 0.00:
T-Shirt — MSRP of 0.00
- Small — 25.00
- Medium — 25.00
- Large — 20.00
This removes the sale trigger entirely and the site will simply display the lowest price across the child items with no sale indicator. If you don't make this change, the sale pricing will persist until the Large child item's price is brought back up to the MSRP (21.00) or above.
Want to show customers the price range more clearly?
If you'd like your Ecommerce site to display variably priced items as "From 25.00" — where 25.00 is the price of the cheapest child item — this can be configured as part of billable Design work. Please get in touch with your Account Manager or with any member of the Success or Support Teams if you'd like to discuss this.
A note on Ecommerce caching
Parts of Citrus-Lime Ecommerce are cached, which helps to improve site speed by storing a snapshot of your data rather than querying the database on every page load. This snapshot updates approximately every sixty seconds when a change has been made, so some changes you make in Cloud POS may not appear on your Ecommerce site immediately.
