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Miva 10 - Precision Pricing

With Miva’s Precision Pricing capability, merchants can now price products at less than a penny, which is helpful for stores that sell small products, like industrial fasteners, in mass quantities. Specifically, prices can be set to eight decimal places, allowing for prices as low as $0.00000001.

Adding precision pricing or weight may have unexpected consequences when using third party integrations that use these data fields. If, for example, you create a $0.005 product, it is not appropriate for us to decide that this should be exposed differently in the API. That could also create unexpected consequences, so we leave it to our customers to make these decisions and deal with these consequences downstream.

Installation and Setup

Precision Pricing requires no configuration after upgrading to Miva version 10.11.00. In fact, most customers will still use the standard two decimal places and see no change.

In Use

Behind the scenes, different calculation and data storage rules are applied when Miva finds a product where more than two decimal places have been assigned, for example as a product weight, product price, or in volume discounting table.

Situations where knowing the high precision price is important (e.g. when multiplying by chosen quantity).
Situations where converting to two digit pricing totals of item x quantity makes more sense, for customer facing totals and typical checkout integrations.

Here’s an example of a volume discount table showing discounts. The actual product is priced is $0.5596 (not shown) and weight is stored to precision, 0.01344358 lbs.

Customer Experience

What the customer would see is, and appropriately, they are seeing high precision pricing because this is a per unit price.

If a customer adds 1001 of this item to the basket, they see this, a much more appropriate, two-digit total cost.:

Miva Behind the Scenes

At an order level, for a product with Precision Pricing, none of the precision-rich data is lost and is reflected in the order information.

While in the database, even though the basket is presented with two decimal places, the precision price information is retained.

Integrations and Compatibility

Any integration that uses the Miva API to pull orders, also receives rich, precision pricing and weight data.

To ensure downstream compatibility, Miva adapts native integrations that do not support precision pricing where they require us to send a quantity.

For example, In places where it would break to send this information:

Item: #12 WIDGET
Quantity: 1001
Price: $0.07884
Total: $78.92

We instead send:

Item: (Qty: 1001) #12 WIDGET
Quantity: 1
Price: $78.92
Total: $78.92

In this case, for PayPal:

Notably, TaxJar DOES support precision pricing and we send it rich precision pricing data when available.

Notes

Unless a product is $0, a basket line will never be less than $0.01 to protect against giving basket totals of zero If a product is stored as $0.00005 and a customer adds only one of the item to the basket, the basket total will be $0.01.
The same API calls you may be using today to add or update products now fully support precision pricing and weight without any modification.
Miva Provision File and Flat File Import methods for managing volume discount pricing now support precision pricing.

Miva 10 - Precision Pricing

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