ELS, product pricing based on pricing policy rules

Electrosystems (ELS) specializes in importing, developing, and distributing electronic security systems in the B2B sector. They have been selling the most advanced technological products at competitive prices in Greece since 2007.

Background

Since it's a long-standing company, they have a robust, established workflow with an ERP system at its core to manage customers and orders.

ELS has an online shop that is used only for creating preliminary orders without asking for payment. The finalization of orders happens offline.

Since they have various partnership deals, their customers get a customized pricing offer for the products. When customers log in to the shop, they see those prices. (They do now!)

Problem

While the previous team of developers was able to set up WooCommerce and the data importing and synchronization, they failed to implement the pricing logic.

The ERP has the option to expose the customer and product data. It does not offer an endpoint to retrieve a product price based on a customer, only the underlyinushg raw rules data that is used for the different discount policies.

The partial and failed pricing policy implementation created more confusion for the customers than helped them.

With customers complaining about seeing different prices than in their final offers, ELS wasted countless hours in ad-hoc verifications and debugging that seemed to go nowhere.

Mistrust and high response time started to characterize the communication with the original developers.

Solution

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