Scheduled prices feature overview

The Scheduled prices feature enables shop administrators to schedule price changes, which are to happen in the future for multiple products simultaneously.

Instead of changing prices manually, you can prepare a list of prices with time frames which are to be applied automatically. For example, you might want to increase prices of the products that are of great demand on a certain date before the Christmas eve and decrease them on a certain date afterward. The Scheduled Prices feature enables you to specify the prices and the dates beforehand.

An in-built cron-job will switch the prices on the specified dates for all the specified products automatically. Apart from major events, you can use this feature to update prices across the shop without having to do it manually for each product, since the feature allows you to do it from one place in bulk.

Price types

Currently, the feature only works with the following price types:

• default
• original

A default price is the one that is shown as a real price of product.

An original price is the one that, in the front end, is shown as a strikethrough to identify that the price has been used before the default price was applied as if there is a promotion.

Time zones

You can define price schedules using any time zone. For example, the following value defines the price application time in Europe/Berlin time zone: 2019-06-23T23:00:00+02:00.

Defining product price schedules

You can define price schedules as follows: Import a csv file with a list of prices. This option is for bulk operations. You can import the file via Back Office or manually. Add a price schedule to a single abstract or concrete product. This option is suitable for working with a small number of products. See Editing an Abstract Product.

Cron job

Once imported, prices do not get updated right away. In order to automate price application, there is a cron job shipped with the feature. The cron job checks if there are any imported scheduled prices that need to be applied or reverted. If there is a price schedule that passed its starting or ending date, the cron job applies the changes.

By default, the cron job runs every day at 00:06:00-00:00. In some cases, it might be necessary to change this behavior. For example, if you schedule a price to be updated at 00:01:00-00:00, the price will be updated at 00:06:00-00:00 since that’s when the cron job runs. 00:01:00-00:00. In this case, you can schedule the cron job to be run at 00:01:00-00:00. When you add, edit or delete a price schedule while editing a product, the cron job runs automatically for this single product.

If you import prices that need to be applied right away, you can run price-product-schedule:apply console command. This command applies the imported prices in current store. If needed, you can specify the store by adding a store relation parameter. For example, you would use the following command to apply imported prices in US store: APPLICATION_STORE=US console price-product-schedule:apply.

Scheduled price application logic

You can schedule multiple prices on overlapping dates. For example, you define that:

• Scheduled price #1 takes effect between 01.01 and 31.07.
• Scheduled price #2 takes effect between 25.02 and 08.06.
• Scheduled price #3 takes effect between 01.03 and 01.04.

In this case:

• Scheduled price #1 is applied on 01.01 and remains active till scheduled price #2 gets applied on 25.02.

• Scheduled price #2 remains active till the scheduled price #3 gets applied on 01.03.

• When active period of scheduled price #3 ends on 01.04, price reverts back to scheduled price #2.

• When active period of scheduled price #2 ends on 08.06, price reverts back to the scheduled price #1.

• When there are no scheduled prices left to apply, the ORIGINAL price specified outside of scheduled price logic, gets applied.

• When there are no scheduled prices left to apply and there has been no ORIGINAL price specified outside of scheduled price logic, it will become impossible to add the product to cart and its price won’t be displayed.

Current constraints

Currently, the feature has the following functional constraints which are going to be resolved in the future.

• The default number of prices which the cron job can process at a time is 1000.
• The feature does not work with merchant prices (relations) and volume prices.

Related Business User documents