Price books are a feature in Vend that enable you to offer special pricing and loyalty amounts. These can be restricted to certain customer groups or outlets, enabling you to have sophisticated pricing strategies for your store. You can also automate start and end dates of sales, which makes it easy to plan and set up in advance.

Once you set up a price book, the pricing will automatically apply for eligible customers and outlets when you, or your staff, process a sale in the sell screen.

Some price book pricing will also apply for your Vend Ecommerce store - check out the section below for more details.

• What can I use price books for?
• Set up a new price book
  • In the app
  • By importing a csv spreadsheet
  • By duplicating an existing price book
• Export a price book
• Update a price book

• Delete a price book

• How do price books work with my Vend Ecommerce store?

What can I use price books for?

• Target pricing to groups of customers: Reward your customers by setting up customer groups for staff, VIPs, local business, and offering them bargains.
• Target pricing for one store: Run an outlet store or a wholesale store, or a special available in one outlet/store only.
• Encourage customers to buy more through tiered pricing: Offer a different price to customers who buy more than one of a product
• Control your loyalty: offer double loyalty amounts for VIPs or promotions, or remove loyalty when you're running a sale.

Set up a new price book

To set up a price book, click the Product tab, and select the Price Book option.

Click Add Price Book.

Customise the settings for your price book:

• Name - A recognisable name for your price book (like summer clearance sale, or VIP pricing)
• Customer group - Who the pricing applies to. This can be all customers or a specific group of customers. To learn more about creating customer groups, click here.
• Outlet - Which stores the pricing applies to. This can be all stores or a specific store. If you want the same pricing in 2 or more stores, but not in all stores, you'll need to create multiple price books. Check out the instructions on replicating price books below.
• Valid from - the date you want your pricing/sale to start. Leave blank to start immediately.
• Valid to - the date you want your sale/pricing to end. Your sale will run up to (but not including) this date. Leave it blank for an ongoing sale.

Finally, you need to add products to your price book. There are three ways to add products:

1. In the Vend app - this is great for sales with a few products
2. Import a CSV spreadsheet - this is great for sales with a large amount of products
3. Replicate an existing price book - this helps you to run custom pricing for a number of stores, or different groups.

In the Vend app:

• Click 'Save price book' to create your price book. Your new price book will open.
• In the search bar, type the name or SKU of each product you want to add.
• Find the correct product in the list that appears.
• Press 'enter', or click the product and select 'Add'.
• Alternatively, scan the barcode of each product you want to add into the search field.

Each product will be added to your price book with its current supply price and retail price, as well as loyalty amount if you're using Vend's loyalty program.

Adjust the pricing:

• Increasing or decreasing the supply markup %
• Apply a discount percentage
• Use the yellow field at the top to apply the markup or discount change to all products on the page.
• Manually altering the retail price.

Set the loyalty:

• If your product uses your loyalty ratio, the loyalty amount will adjust as you change the price of the product.
• If your product has a custom loyalty amount, this will stay fixed. Custom loyalty is notcalculated on any Ecommerce sales.
• You can switch from ratio to custom or vice versa. You may like to do this if you don't want to offer loyalty on sale items. Click the link below each loyalty value to change to fixed or to use the default.

Set quantities:

• Set minimum and maximum unit quantities - this enables you to restrict the number of items a customer can buy at a discounted rate, or require a minimum amount purchased to receive the rate.

Important: Minimum and Maximum units are not supported in Vend Ecommerce. If you have tiered pricing in your store, the lowest price will apply. We don't recommend making these price books available in your ecommerce store.

• You can add the same product to your price book multiple times. For example, you could set one price for 0-2 products purchased, and one price for 3 or more purchased. 

Add products using a csv import.

You can import products in bulk to create a price book. This enables you to:

• Filter and export a product list from your Vend account, for example, all products from one supplier or brand.
• Export a price book you've already made, and reimport it.

This is useful if you want to run the same, or similar sales, across some, but not all, of your stores.

Download the template here.

The fields on the CSV are:

• Handle [Recommended*] - the product handle - must match an existing product in Vend
• SKU [Mandatory] - the product SKU - must match an existing product in Vend
• Retail_Price [Mandatory] - the final price for the product. You can also leave this as the current retail price, and update the discount using the price book discount fields. If you store is tax-exclusive, this is your before-tax price. If your store is tax-inclusive, this is your after-tax price.
• Loyalty_value [Optional] - the loyalty value you'd like set for this product. Leave it blank to use your store's loyalty ratio. If you want $0.00, you must put a 0 in the field.
• Min_units [Optional] - the minimum number of units the customer needs to purchase to get this price
• Max_units [Optional] - the maximum number of units the customer can purchase to get this price

Duplicate an existing price book

To save time, you can duplicate any of your existing price books (including the General price book, which has all your products). This will create an identical copy of the price book. You can then edit the new price book to add or remove products, and change the price book details like name, outlets, and dates.

Creating the copy

• On the price books page, find the price book you wish to duplicate.
• Click the 'view' link. The price book will open.
• Click the 'Duplicate price book' button.
• You'll be prompted to confirm the duplication request. While the price book is duplicating, it's very important that you don't change the original price book in any way. The duplication may take several minutes.

You will be returned to the main price book page. The new price book will show as 'Duplicating'. You can refresh the page to check if the duplication has finished.

Editing the copy

Once it's finished, you can click 'Edit' to update the details. You can:

• Change the name
• Change the customer group
• Change the outlet
• Change the dates
• Import more items
• Remove existing items
• Adjust discount, markup, and other amounts.

Hint: Want to create a price book with all your products? Create a duplicate of your General price book, which is an up-to-date list of your current products.

Export a price book

On the price book page, click 'view' for the price book you want to export. The price book will open.

Click the 'Export price book' button. Your price book CSV file will download.

Important: Exported price books will have an ID for every item. If you want to use your exported file to create a NEW price book, rather than edit an existing one, please delete the ID column.

Updating a price book

To edit an existing price book, open the price book page.

You can:

• Click 'Edit' to update the price book in the Vend app, by adding or removing products, or changing the pricing.
• Complete a bulk update by exporting the price book and updating the spreadsheet.

When editing an exported spreadsheet to update an existing price book:

• Keep the ID column. This ensures that we update the pricing on the correct product.
• To ADD a new product, leave the ID field blank. We will create an ID for that product when you import it.
• You cannot remove a product from a price book via CSV import.

Once you've finished editing the price book:

• Save the changes.
• Click the 'edit price book' button on the price book page in Vend.
• Click the 'Choose File' button, and select your updated price book CSV file.
• Click the 'Save Price book' button. Your price book will update.

Deleting a price book

To delete a price book, open the price book page, and click the 'Delete Price Book' button.

How do price books work with my Vend Ecommerce store?

If you're using Vend Ecommerce, some of your price books will automatically apply to your online store, so you don't need to worry about setting up sales in more than one place.

How does ecommerce know which price to display?

If you have multiple price books active, we'll show the lowest available price for that time. This doesn't include price books with date ranges that haven't started or had already ended.

Which price books can you use for your ecommerce store?

Price books that only apply to a particular customer group or outlet cannot be enabled for Ecommerce.

If you enable Ecommerce on these price books, the pricing will switch to 'all customers' and 'all outlets' for both offline and online sales.

Do any features of price books not work for my ecommerce store?

• Minimum and Maximum units are not supported. If you have tiered pricing in your store, the lowest price will apply. We don't recommend making these price books available in your ecommerce store.
• Custom Loyalty Loyalty is not calculated on any ecommerce sales.
• Customer Groups are not supported. This means you can't have VIP, warehouse, or staff pricing in your ecommerce store, for example. Don't enable these price books.
• Outlet Restrictions are not fully supported - any price book you enable for ecommerce will have those prices available online, regardless of whether the price book outlet matches the outlet you've linked to the ecommerce store. This means that you could have in store sales for the linked outlet at one price, and ecommerce sales at another price.