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  3. How to Configure Your Promotions

Pricing and Incentive FAQ

Updated

This Article Contains The Following Questions:

Q: How and when does Ordergroove calculate pricing?

The base price of a product is set via the product feed — which contains all product details, including price — and is sent regularly from the merchant to Ordergroove for catalog maintenance.  Ordergroove then calculates recurring order prices by taking these base prices and applying any system incentives on top.

From this point, a number of caveats and use cases are taken into consideration:

  • Latest Core Subscription Manager (Ordergroove Admin)
    • Generally speaking, subscriptions themselves do not have prices; prices belong to discrete products in a subscription order. 
    • Upcoming orders will be recalculated upon page load within the Subscription Manager. Recalculation will refresh the subscription price to the most current price based on the latest Product Feed price passed and applicable incentive until an order locks.
    • Upon subscription creation, Ordergroove generates the next future order for each subscription item based on the start date of the subscription and the chosen frequency.  Out of the box, orders lock 10 days prior to placing, at the time the Order Reminder email is sent. While locked, the order will reflect the last updated Product Feed price passed prior to locking, until placement. (Note: For merchants creating accounts with Ordergroove after June 2022, order reminder emails are sent 4 days prior. Please reach out to support if you'd like to change or check this cadence.)
    • If a customer changes their subscription quantity or changes SKU in the Subscription Manager, then the price of their order is recalculated.
    • Merchants further have the option to enable Best Deal Guarantee for their program, which creates a log of all prices sent in the product feed and selects the best price available within a defined window to present to the customer.

  • Legacy Core Subscription Manager
    • Upon subscription creation, Ordergroove generates the next future order for each subscription item based on the start date of the subscription and the chosen frequency.  Item prices are set at that moment and do not recalculate until the time of the next order reminder email, at which time they will reflect the latest product feed price.
    • Order pricing on the Subscription Manager may not reflect the most up-to-date price or discount until the order has been locked, and recalculated.
    • If a customer hits 'Send Now' before the order has had the opportunity to lock, pricing passed within the Order XML may not reflect the most current order price.

Q: How Does Ordergroove Securely Place Orders?

Q: How Does Ordergroove Communicate Discounts In The Order XML?

Q: How does Ordergroove work with site-wide promotions or price books? 

We recommend that our clients pass us the lowest price offered on the site for that day so that subscribers — your most loyal customers — receive the best offers you can provide. 

We can also implement Best Deal Guarantee logic, which analyzes pricing in a given time window and gives the customer the best price offered during that lookback period.

In the case of BOGOs, we recommend applying a 50% discount through the feed, so that your customers receive the same discount they would receive on your site, regardless of quantity. This practice avoids the overstock and subscription churn risk that would result from forcing the customer to carry a quantity of two for their subscriptions.

Q: How do site-wide promotions and flash sales work with initial and recurring orders?

Ordergroove does not read site-wide promotions. Unless custom logic has previously been agreed upon and implemented during the integration, product prices reflected in the Subscription Manager, CSA manager, and transactional emails are based on the price passed in the product feed for each item. Recurring incentives are calculated off of the base price.

Similarly, Ordergroove does not control coupon stacking or calculation of initial order incentives.

Note: Merchants using Ordergroove's legacy offers can leverage the og_cart_autoship cookie, which contains an array of all the products that the customer has selected for a subscription opt-in, to determine if an item is eligible for the promotion.

Q: Does Ordergroove use Shopify’s Compare At price or Product Price for subscriptions?

Ordergroove will use the Product Price set in Shopify for recurring orders. You can switch to the Compare At price in settings.

  1. Log in to your Ordergroove Admin.
  2. Go to Settings > Shopify Integration.
  3. Toggle Use "Compare At Price" instead of "Product Price" for subscriptions and recurring orders to On.
  4. Click Save.

If a product does not have a Compare At price set in Shopify, Ordergroove will default to the Product Price instead.

Keep in mind that Initial Order Incentive will always apply to the price a customer would pay if they were checking out normally, so if the product is already discounted Ordergroove will apply an additional discount to it on initial checkout. The Use compare at price setting only affects the base price that Ordergroove uses on recurring subscription orders.

Note: Custom development and Shopify scripts can override Ordergroove’s settings. If pricing doesn’t seem to match what you expect, reach out to Ordergroove support, and we’ll take a look. Please include the products and orders to investigate.

Q: How does Price Lock work?

Price lock means a subscription product's price can not change. This is commonly used when you want to grandfather clause a customer in to a deal they signed up with.
Locking prices by order reminder email:
  1. An Order reminder email locks the current price of product for order placement. For example, 3 days before order placement.
  2. At the time of order placement:
    1. If current product price is higher than the ones locked in order reminder email, then no change is applied.
    2. If current product price is lower than the one locked in the order reminder email, then the final product price would be changed to the currently lower price.
  3. Once best base-price is determine, recurring order discounts will be applied, if any are configured.
Price locking on the subscription level:
  1. By default subscription price locking, there are two separate settings (both applied by Ordergroove on the backend:
    1. "considerSubPrice" - we consider the subscription price lock and the product feed price and honor the lower of the two prices for the customer.
    2. "overrideWithSubPriceIfSet" - we will always use the subscription price lock for recurring orders, regardless of the product feed price
  2. For subscription price lock, Ordergroove will not recalculate the locked order to consider the changed/updated sub.price, you would need to update the order_item price as well if sub price changes after order is locked
  3. This update of price on order_item level would have to be done by merchant via API call
  4. For subscriptions with that are "price locked", the price locking action is happening also at the time of when the order reminder email is being sent out
  5. Once the price is locked for these orders then nothing would change this price until te order placement except manual price change of order_item mentioned above