Per-customer price tiers, explained

How wholesale pricing actually breaks

It starts honestly: the big account negotiated a better case price, the new store pays list, and somebody keeps a spreadsheet. Then a rep quotes last year's price, the office invoices this year's, the customer calls about the difference, and everyone digs through old emails to find out what was agreed. Multiply by every customer and every price change, and wrong-price invoices become a quiet, permanent tax — some overcharge and cost trust, some undercharge and cost margin, and all of them cost the argument.

What a tier is

A tier is a named price level — list, preferred, key account — with a price per product. Assign a customer a tier and their price follows them into every order, whoever writes it: the rep in the store, the customer on WhatsApp, the office pasting in an email. Nobody has to remember, because nothing is remembered — it's looked up.

• One customer can sit on several tiers, and the cheapest wins. The overlap case that wrecks spreadsheets — a customer who qualifies twice — resolves itself in the customer's favour, which is the answer you'd have chosen anyway.
• Promotions sit on top. A promotion changes the price for its duration and then stops. Nobody edits prices and remembers to change them back, because the changing-back is the part that never happens.
• Minimums and case packs are rules, not habits. If you sell by the case, an order that breaks a case is refused wherever it was written — and a WhatsApp customer is told why, in the chat, instead of the warehouse discovering it.

Rolling tiers out without a project

Don't model every exception on day one. Import the catalogue, create two or three tiers that cover most customers, assign everyone, and handle the genuine exceptions as they surface. A pricing structure that's 95% right and always applied beats one that's 100% designed and lives in a spreadsheet.

How this works in RepBuddy is on the products & pricing page.