Core Commerce supports two types of pricing for web sites, SKU pricing and price lists.

SKU pricing is a basic pricing model that lets you specify the same prices for a SKU to all users. Price lists provide a more sophisticated model that allows you to target a set of prices to a specific group of customers.

Typically, most multisite environments use price lists to price their items. With SKU-based pricing, you may only specify one price per item. Price lists are more flexible and make it possible to have different prices for the same SKU.

For example, if you are using a multisite environment, you could implement a price list called German Prices to show one set of prices in Euros to shoppers who visit your German web site, and another price list called US Prices to show another set of prices in dollars to shoppers who visit your US web site. You could also use price lists to create time-based prices, for example, modifying the price of an item for a specified amount of time.

Typically, prices are defined in a base price list and inherited by other price lists. This allows you to create a hierarchy of price lists and change prices only when you want to override inherited values or specify volume discounts.