Offer and Price Designer Overview

The Offer & Price Designer is designed to be a separate component of Fulfillment Catalog.

Although the Fulfillment Catalog system is a robust system that can perform all catalog related functions, it is still very technical and it is suitable for technical users who define low level records and fulfillment details.

The Offer and Price Designer component eliminates this complexity with an intuitive user interface and a simplified workflow. Business users can use the Offer and Price Designer for business oriented view of the data, and also use it on a daily basis for offer creation activities.

The benefits of Offer & Price Designer are as follows:

  • Business users can define, browse, and interact with customer oriented products, thereby hiding the complexity of the low level technical catalog.
  • Business users can perform the following operations related to Offers:
    • Browsing, searching, and filtering offers
    • Creating and modifying offers
    • Modifying offer segments like CompatibleSegment and IncompatibleSegment
    • Modifying ProductRequiredFor, IncompatibleProduct, and autoprovisioning product of an offer
    • Modifying and browsing offer hierarchy parameters like ProductComprisedOf
    • Modifying Offer price including price characteristics, segments and ProductRequiresGroup
    • Modifying Offer discount, which includes discount, characteristics, segments and ProductRequiresGroup
  • Reduction in user clicks or wait time required to perform catalog tasks.

Offer and Pricing Designer can be started in two modes, lite and heavy. Use the property app.dataVolume to set the mode. For example, app.dataVolume=lite or app.dataVolume=heavy If this property is not set while starting the OPD server, the OPD starts in lite mode by default.

Use lite mode when existing or new offer have simple hierarchy with total number of child nodes 20 or less than 20, for first three levels in the hierarchy and any relationship type.

Use heavy mode if existing data set is large and offers have complex hierarchy with total number of child nodes for first three levels in the hierarchy are more than 20.

There are some differences in user experience and feature limitation when OPD runs in the heavy and lite modes as given in the following table:
Heavy Mode OPD Lite Mode OPD
The heavy mode OPD has large dataset therefore child nodes are fetched page-wise. This is done by using the property fc.pcochildren.pagesize. The default size is 10 child nodes per page. You can view all the child nodes in a single window as the dataset is limited to 20 child nodes.
Need to scroll the Products tab to view all the child nodes, if the child nodes of a product are more than what is defined in the fc.pcochildren.pagesize property. No need to scroll the Products tab as the dataset is limited.
While adding the product through Products tab, it needs to be added in the hierarchy before scrolling the tab, else the product tray gets lost. Scrolling the Products tab while adding product does not cause any loss of product tray.
Hierarchy view is visible only when the Products tab is accessed. Hierarchy view button is visible on the Offer Details page.
On the Price tab, it takes a time to fetch the price of child product. No waiting time, as the price of child products are available immediately.
To view the price of a particular child node, user needs to navigate to that child node and then switch to the Price tab. No such navigation required.
On the Products tab, only first level of child nodes are listed. Showing all child nodes creates an impression of duplicate child nodes. Child nodes from all three levels are displayed.
Incompatibility between child nodes is not displayed in the heavy mode OPD. Incompatibility between child nodes is displayed on mouse hover.