Price behavior in Product Advisor

When creating a Product Advisor search space, you may use either the list price (found in the LISTPRICE table) or the standard price (found in the OFFER, OFFERPRICE, and TRADEPOSCN tables).

If you are using the separate search space, each catalog entry must have a price defined, else it will not display in any metaphors.

If you are using the base search space, catalog entries do not have to have a price defined in order to display. When using a Price Comparison metaphor, catalog entries which do not have a price defined will display with a blank space in the price row. This effectively reduces the value of the comparison for those customers who are concerned about price when comparing two or more products. When using either the Product Exploration or Guided Sell metaphor, catalog entries that do not have a price defined will not display once the customer submits price requirements. Since these metaphor effectively query the search space with either a " price<" or " price>" than some value, catalog entries without a price do not display. Products without a price do not behave as if the price is either 0 or infinity.

Product Advisor requires that you adhere to the following additional restrictions:

• Product Advisor only uses the standard price for the lowest limit of the quantity range. If no range with minimumquantity=null exists in the OFFER table, then Product Advisor interprets this to mean that no price exists for that catalog entry. Product Advisor ignores other quantity ranges.
• If a catalog entry is included in multiple categories, each with a distinct search space, and if any of those search spaces use a standard price, then the resynchronization of all separate search spaces will use the standard price for that catalog entry. If only a few of the affected search spaces use standard price, ensure that you avoid mixes of standard and list price in the separate search spaces.

To include price in a search space, add a price attribute and identify which price (list or standard) to use through the XML file created for the PACreateSearchSpaceBatchCmd scheduler command. The values for the <columnName> and <attrName> tags identify the price to include in the search space. As with any attribute used with Product Advisor which does not come from the ATTRIBUTE or ATTRVALUE tables, the value for <attrName> should not be translated, but should be the column name from the base schema. This information is displayed in the following table: