Oracle ATG Web Commerce supports two pricing methods for use on product pages:
Static pricing—Each item in the catalog has a list price stored in the
listPriceproperty of the catalog repository (optionally, each item can also have asalePrice). You display the price on the appropriate site pages, and the Commerce pricing services use that price as a base for calculating order totals, shipping costs, and sales tax.Dynamic pricing—Programmatically determines the price. Dynamic pricing is always used on the shopping cart and purchase process pages, but can also be used on product pages if necessary.
These are both forms of SKU-based pricing, as opposed to pricing based on price lists. See the Using Price Lists chapter for information on price lists.
Using dynamic pricing on a product page can cause a significant decrease in performance compared to using static pricing. Many sites do not need to show dynamic pricing on product pages; it may be sufficient to show dynamic prices only when a customer places items in the shopping cart. For example, suppose you send a specific group of customers a coupon for 20% off all blue items. On the product pages of the site, blue items appear with their static list or sale price, which is the same for all customers. However, when a customer with the “20% off” coupon adds a blue item to his or her shopping cart, dynamic pricing takes effect, and the item price appears on the Shopping Cart or Checkout page (for example) with a discount of 20%.
If you do decide to use dynamic pricing on product pages, you can still ensure a high level of performance by using the pricing features selectively. You can use dynamic pricing on certain product templates and static pricing on others. You can also choose to restrict dynamic pricing to certain types of customers (for example, registered visitors only).
