Developing a Pricing Strategy
Before you begin developing your Pricing Strategy, you need to have an idea of what your pricing goals
are. Also, you need to have an understanding of how to work your way around the Margin Master program. Once you have an understanding of both topics, you are ready to get started!

There are a couple of things you want to take into consideration when developing a pricing strategy. Many retailers struggle with the same problems – letting old pricing procedures dictate your pricing strategy, over-complicating your pricing strategy, and not utilizing the technology available to help create a pricing strategy.

Let’s face it – nobody likes change. Ace Retailers have been managing their pricing the same way for over 20 years, using the same outdated technology.  Although change is hard, taking the step towards change will save you time, streamline your process, and make you money.

Creating Your Pricing Strategy
To create a step to your Pricing Strategy, you simply make the selections in Margin Master to display the group of SKU's you want to make a rule for (example: everything less than Ace Retail).  Once that group of items is displayed in the center of the screen, you need to make a Future Price selection. Once you have selected your Future Price, rather than clicking the apply button, you will click the camera in the bottom right corner of the screen.

A pop-up screen will appear that says “Enter Saved Selection Name to be added to your Pricing Strategy”.  Name your step – a good example may be <AR to AR (less than Ace Retail to Ace Retail). It is a good idea to name your steps to reflect what you are doing. That way, you are able to easily identify and recognize the different steps to your Pricing Strategy.

Once you have named your step, click OK. You have just created the first step to your Pricing Strategy!The newly created step has been saved to the Pricing Strategy Manager. To verify this, click on Strategy/Manage Pricing Strategy (or CTRL-S) from the Margin Master screen. The Manage Pricing Strategy Screen will appear displaying a list of all saved selections.

The Pricing Strategy Loop
Developing a Pricing Strategy can be a huge challenge. Margin Master helps simplify this because of it ability to help you incrementally build your new Pricing Strategy. Continue adding steps to your Pricing Strategy by following the Pricing Strategy Loop.  After creating a new step, Execute your Pricing Strategy by clicking Strategy/Execute Pricing Strategy (or CTRL-X) from the Margin Master Screen. After clicking Yes to execute your strategy, you will see Margin Master go through each step you have created for your Pricing Strategy, making the SKU selections, creating the future price, and implement your chosen rounding scheme. Once Margin Master has completed the execution of your Pricing Strategy, all items that require a price change will then display in the center of your screen.

Review this list of Skus, and identify other pricing concerns. To effectively review the results, you should utilize several different sort sequences to look for obvious problems. When another issue is identified, create a new Pricing Strategy Rule that addresses the concern, and go through the loop again.

Repeat the loop until the resulting changes are acceptable for your store.

Strategy Sequence
It is critical to understand the importance of the sequence of steps in your Pricing Strategy. The steps are executed in the order listed in the Pricing Strategy Manager. The sequence can be changed by moving the desired step up or down in the Strategy Manager. It is possible that two steps executed in a different sequence will deliver completely different results.  When adding new steps, the steps are added to the bottom of the list. Usually, the new step will need to be moved to its proper location in the sequence.