The Magento E-commerce platform is fast approaching the one year mark since its initial 1.0 release in March 2008. I’ve been running numerous websites on the platform since August 2008 and have been very pleased with the results. The experience has not been without it’s hiccups and hardships, but overall a positive experience in all aspects: technical support, marketing, and the all important revenue generation.
One of the pluses of Magento is the ability to manage multiple websites and webstores from the same Magento installation. This has proven invaluable to me. I currently operate 4 different webstores from the same Magento installation with great success. I’d like to share how you can use special pricing feature in Magento across multiple websites.
One of the marketing strategies that I like to use to help our customers understand the value of a product is to list the MSRP or List Price of a given product and then show a special price. The special price sparks emotion and increases click through and ultimately conversion rates on my website. However, soon after launching Magento I realized that due to a bug in the Magento platform I could not offer special pricing across multiple websites for the same product. With the help of Magento support we came up with a work around until the bug can be fixed.
Special Pricing Setup in Magento
Set special pricing for the default (main store)
To setup special pricing for multiple websites log into the admin area of Magento and navigate to Catalog > Manage Products page.
Keep All Store Views selected when editing the special price the first time
You will notice that on the manage product page you can choose the store view and the products associated with the store view. The Magento system for multiple websites is organized by Website > Web Store > Store View. You can have multiple web stores on a website and multiple store views per web store. (more a more detailed explanation of Magento multiple websites visit the Magento knowledge base article.)
The first step is to set the special pricing for your default Magento store. Simply leave the store view selector to all store views and this will change the values for special pricing in the default Magento store.
Browse through your products until you find the product you want and click it to go to the product information page.
Default value must be set first
On the product information page it shows in the upper left corner “Default Values” In order to get special pricing to work across multiple websites on the same product and have the special pricing be different, the default values must be set first.
On the product information page, select the price tab on the left side of the screen and then add the price you want the customer to see crossed out; then add the special price you want the customer to pay for the product. I use the MSRP or list price in the price field and then the retail price I want to sell the product at in the special price field. Here is the tweak to get special pricing to work across multiple websites.
Set the special price higher then price to force magento to allow special pricing across all websites.
In the default values set the special price to a price higher than the price field. Magento will automatically not show the special price because it is higher than the price. By doing this it will allow you to set different special prices on your other websites, whereas without this step it will not work due to a bug in Magento. Once your price and higher special price are entered click “Save and Continue Editing” to save the product.
Be sure to save before changing Stove Views
Adding special prices to all your websites
Once the product is saved change the store view to the website store view that you want to edit. A message prompt will advise you that data will be lost if it hasn’t been saved. If the changes were saved previously just click ok and change to the new store view.
Choose the store view you want to add a special price in.
In the new store view, deselect the “Use default Value” and put in the price and special price for the product. Add a start date and an end date for the special price. If the special price is the ongoing retail price for the product then leave the special price end date blank or put a date far into the future.
Set both the price and special price for the store view by deslecting "Use default Values"
Note: For special pricing to work across different websites, the price needs to be set in the store view and not use the default value, even if the price for this store view is the same as the default value,
Once your changes are complete click “Save and continue Editing.”
Continue to change to all the store views that need different pricing or special pricing using the method described above until you have interated through all your store views. For this example, I have one more store view to change and then my special pricing is complete for this product.
My final price change for my third store view
Summary
The above example shows how to implement special pricing across mulitple website store views in Magento. The key tweak to work around the bug to allow special pricing to be different on different websites is to set the default value in special pricing to a higher price then the price field.
In the example above I set the price in default to $67.96 and the default special price to $75.00. In my second store I set teh default price to $67.96 and the special price to $59.99. Lastly the third store I chose not to do special pricing and simply set the price to $59.99. If you try to do special pricing without setting the default special price to something higher then the default price then the special price for any one store view is replicated on every other store view in Magento.
Lastly, if there are hundreds of products that need special pricing I recommend doing one product manually like this; then use Magento profiles to export all the products to change (including the one manually setup); finally, change the values of all the other products to follow the format of the manually changed product.
