The background,

Now there is a certain probability of the following two problems in the daily operation of the official website mall:

1) Offer information is not aligned

There are more and more types of promotional offers in the official website mall, and the discounts that can affect the actual price paid by the end user include panic buying, full reduction, coupons, vouchers and so on. In actual business operations, different promotional offers are configured by different operations. If there is no internal alignment between operations, the discounts that are not set at the same time under normal circumstances will be superimposed by users, and the actual paid price may be lower than the cost price.

2) Preferential price mismatch

In daily or big promote preferential configuration, there is a certain probability will match wrong quotation (extreme scenarios, price less a zero, this is equivalent to the original based on the expected rate ten percent), and if that were to happen might cause user crazy order, cause great losses, which we usually said “while wool”

(Quoted by The Daily Mail, Photograph: AIan Price)

In view of the above two cases, we hope to give some early warning to the ordering and purchasing behaviors that are lower than the “floor price threshold” set by the operation. If necessary, we can block the ordering behavior of users and timely stop the loss. It would be better if we can avoid these behaviors in advance.

Second, marketing price ability matrix

In order to solve the problems encountered in the background, we first briefly understand the planning and construction of marketing price ability matrix.

Through “Vivo mall pricing center – Calmly deal with complex scene price calculation”, “Vivo global mall time machine – Large promotional activities guarantee sharp weapon”, we know that the marketing price service of the official website mall has been unified to the promotion of pricing center, in the process of pricing center construction also found some problems:

  • The business positioning of the pricing center is to calculate the real-time price of an order of goods in the shopping link of the mall, while some access pricing services (such as the list of goods on the official website) actually do not have such high requirements for the real-time price of goods, or the quasi-real-time preferential price is acceptable in the business.

  • When operating students maintain relevant discounts or configure relevant coupons, they cannot easily perceive the discount information of a certain commodity at a certain moment in the future or the lowest price of the commodity at a certain moment, which leads to the fact that the actual selling price is lower than expected due to multiple discounts configured by different operations.

  • There is no historical record of the price after the actual discount of the commodities sold in the mall in a certain period of time, which cannot provide substantial help for the historical data of operation review.

  • If the subsequent platform promises to guarantee the commodity price within xx days during the promotion period, there is no data for reference and comparison.

Aiming at the existing scene and the foreseeable future scene, break at the moment only the limitations of real-time price, through preferential discount in the future, quasi real-time, history offers the business functions of the complement construction unceasingly, gradually improve website mall goods favorable dimensional construction, form a business capability matrix surrounding the goods SKU preferential price, Further enhance the business value of the promotion system.

The following business architecture diagram can be used to describe our marketing price capability matrix planning:

Third, price monitoring

3.1 purpose

Combined with the “mall marketing price ability matrix” planning ability, hope to achieve:

  • Improve the accuracy of preferential activities of operation configuration (prior)

  • Provide multi-dimensional strategy for operational decision making (in progress)

  • Provide relevant marketing price data for mining (after the fact)

3.2 plan

3.2.1 in advance

A. Avoid in advance

  • Preferential mutually exclusive Settings

Whether offers that can be co-incorporated by default are mutually exclusive with other offers; This configuration is suitable for operators to ensure that the current promotion is not shared with other types of promotions when configuring marketing promotions.

  • Set the SKU base price threshold

The value can be set according to the absolute value of the price or discount ratio. For example, the SKU with the original price of 1000 yuan can be set as the base price of 750 yuan according to the absolute value of the price, or 75 percent discount according to the discount ratio. (This operation is very critical, is a prerequisite for some of the monitoring methods in the pre – and in-process scheme).

B. Advance warning

  • When setting the preferential price of activities, timely remind if the price is lower than the minimum price threshold.

C. Advance alarms are generated

  • If the discount price of the goods inspected regularly is lower than the threshold value, the price of the goods inspected regularly is lower than the threshold value.

The inspection process for all goods with a minimum price threshold is as follows:

If it is found that the price is lower than the floor price threshold, it will immediately notify the relevant personnel through the internal communication tool for timely treatment.

3.2.2 matter

A. Timely warning of the effectiveness of the offer

When the preferential activity takes effect, the first time to warn the information below the threshold value.

The processing process of the effective and timely warning of the offer is as follows:

If an alarm notification is found, the following notification will be sent to students related to operation:

B. Real-time monitoring of ordering behavior

Monitor every SKU to place discount in real time, according to policy or alarm or block order behavior.

Real-time monitoring order processing process is shown in the figure below:

When the real-time order is processed by the pricing center, if it is found to be lower than the floor price threshold, the following alarm will be sent:

In addition, price monitoring also provides a series of blocking order strategies, when the preset conditions are met, it will directly block the normal order process, to reduce unnecessary losses. In addition, due to the serious nature of blocking orders, a global blocking order switch is specially set for whether to start blocking orders, and the operation is flexibly controlled.

3.2.3 afterwards

A. Historical marketing price analysis

  • Query historical price trends

  • Precipitate historical preferential price for operation analysis and decision making

B. Warranty for xx days

  • Promise low price guarantee

C. Order lowest price reminder

  • Consult the page for a low price reminder

  • Settlement page low price reminder

Four, the last

Through the implementation of the two dimensions of pre-event and in-event in the above-mentioned scheme, the operation can basically receive notification from the system at the first time when problems occur. In extreme scenarios, users can be directly blocked from placing orders to avoid loss expansion by meeting preset conditions.

In the process of using we also avoid “Wolf” warning notice numbness in this way, so in order to solve this problem, we can be a closed loop for the alarm information processing, the process needs to be done for each alarm information, even after the event processing, to distinguish the alarm reason, because the system false alarm or indeed preferential Settings has a problem, etc., Gradually accustomed to every alarm information can maintain attention and timely response, all possible problems are exposed in the prior stage.

Author: Wei Fuping, Development team of Vivo official website Mall