This video covers some concepts behind Price Groups in Miva Merchant 9 which are found in the Marketing area of your Store Admin. In Miva Merchant 5.5, we had a concept called Price Groups which you can configure to set up some basic discounting functionality in your store. You can imagine a price group to be a specific type of container which you could assign what kind of discount you want to apply, such as 20% off. In order for a customer to get that 20% off discount, they needed an account in your store. Which meant, either your customer or you as the merchant needed to create customer accounts for them. Furthermore, these customer accounts needed to be manually assigned by the merchant to the price group. These customers still would not see this 20% off discount unless they were logged in before adding the products to their basket. Speaking of the products, only products that the merchant assigned to the price group can be discounted. So you had to manually assign these products as well. That's pretty much a full breakdown of how price groups worked in Miva Merchant 5.5. A lot of things had to happen before anyone would be able to see any kind of discount in their basket.
In Miva Merchant 9, Price Groups still manage the discounting in your store, but we've expanded upon the Price Group concept. Now you don't even have to assign customer accounts to a price group. Price Groups can offer discounting to all customers or customers you specifically choose. They can also be configured to offer these discounts at specific times. So there can be a start time and an end time for your discount. Discounts can also be triggered based on the basket details of a shopping session. You know have a variety of options of what type of discount you wish to apply. They can be “Basket Total Discounts” you can discount specific products in a basket, Volume Pricing options, Sale Options and more. You can define qualifying products for your price groups so that a discount is only offered to a shopper provided that a specific product is in their basket. You can define which products you want to apply discounts to. All discounting in Miva Merchant 9 are handled by Price Groups. We have a concept in Miva Merchant called Coupons. Coupons don't actually influence product pricing. Instead, coupons are a mechanism in which customers can join a price group. So if a customer enters in the coupon code for a coupon you created that gives them 20% off of their basket total, it assigns them to a price group that offers them 20% off of their basket total. So an important concept is that coupons do not give discounts. They allow customers access to a price group. It's the price group that gives customers discounts. In the next few videos we’ll walk through setting up different types of price groups configured in a number of different ways so that you can get a handle of configuring price groups in your Miva Merchant 9 store.