Manage Pricing Segments

Use a pricing segment to categorize sets of customers, understand their business motivations, and offer a pricing solution. Use it to track pricing performance and analyze similar customer situations to help you improve revenue and margin.

Assume you must add a corporate segment, international segment, and a domestic segment.

This topic uses example values. You might need different values, depending on your business requirements.

Manage pricing segments.

1. Go to the Pricing Administration work area, then click Tasks > Manage Pricing Segments.

2. On the Manage Pricing Segments page, click Create Pricing Segment Matrix.

   If the Manage Pricing Segments page already displays a pricing matrix, then you must click Delete Pricing Segment Matrix, click Yes in the Warning dialog, close and reopen the Manage Pricing Segments page, then click Create Pricing Segment Matrix. Oracle Pricing can maintain only one pricing matrix for each deployment.

3. In the Create Pricing Segment Matrix dialog, add a check mark for each condition you must include in the matrix, then click OK.

   Add a check mark to each condition that you require. If a row in your matrix doesn't require a condition, then you can leave it empty, and Pricing ignores the condition only for this row. Adding each condition simplifies future maintenance if you must expand your matrix at some time in the future.

4. On the Manage Pricing Segments page, click Actions > Add Row.

5. Add values for the first row of this matrix.

   Revenue Potential	Customer Size	Cost to Serve	Customer Value	Customer Rating	Pricing Segment	Precedence
   Very High	Large	Medium	Very High	Very High	Corporate Segment	1
   High	Medium	High	Medium	High	International Segment	2
   Low	Small	Low	Low	Medium	Domestic Segment	Not applicable

6. Click Actions > Add Row, then add values from the second row of the matrix in step 5.

7. Click Actions > Add Row, then add values from the third row of the matrix in step 5.

8. Create a pricing strategy to make sure your pricing logic meets the pricing objective.

   For details, see Manage Pricing Strategies.

Note

• Pricing compares the pricing profile to each row of the pricing matrix until it finds a match. If more than one row matches, then Pricing uses the row that contains the lowest value in the Precedence.

  For example, if the first and second row match, and if the first row contains a precedence of 1, and the second row contains a precedence of 2, then Pricing uses the first row. For details, see How Profiles, Segments, and Strategies Work Together.

• Pricing might ignore each attribute in the pricing matrix that doesn't include a value, depending on whether the matrix class allows an empty value. For example, consider this row, where - indicates an empty value.

  Revenue Potential	Customer Size	Cost to Serve	Customer Value	Customer Rating	Pricing Segment
  -	-	-	-	Very High	Corporate Segment

  If the matrix class allows an empty value, then this row assigns the Corporate pricing segment to every pricing profile that includes a Very High rating. It ignores the empty attributes, such as revenue, size, and value.

Add a Default Pricing Segment

We recommend that you add at least one row that Pricing can use as the default pricing segment.

• Leave values in the condition columns empty. This way, Pricing won't apply any conditions when determining whether to use the pricing segment.

• Set the Precedence to a value that's lower than any other segment. This way, Pricing will use your default segment only after it has determined that no other segments apply.

• Make sure you assign a pricing strategy to your default segment. For details, see Assign Pricing Strategy.

This will help to avoid run time errors that might happen, such as.

• Pricing strategy was not determined for the transaction

• No matching pricing segment found for the transaction