There are various ways to set up payment in your SuperSaaS schedule: Let users pay when they book their appointment by configuring an online payment provider, require that they buy credit before booking with our integrated credit system, or simply present customers with the price in SuperSaaS but handle payments yourself at the time of their appointment. But the possibilities don’t just stop there. Did you know it is possible to create time-sensitive offers or give new customers one-off discounts and promotions? Or that you can present different types of customers with different prices?
This blog will delve into the latter and present the possibilities of advanced pricing.
Configure general prices
Before we explore advanced price rules, it is good to note that its configuration can be a bit tricky. If you do not require prices to change based on membership, dates and times, and you do not wish to offer discounts based on quantity, it may be easier to simply set a fixed price following the instructions found here.
What is advanced pricing?
A useful alternative to fixed pricing is advanced pricing. In SuperSaaS, advanced pricing rules allow you to make your pricing “dynamic”, meaning they trigger automatic changes to the prices displayed in your schedule based on a wide variety of criteria. By configuring these price rules, you determine which criteria will trigger certain changes to your standard prices. This means you can, for example, charge extra on weekends, process a fee for booking last minute or give an early bird discount, require a deposit, charge for items needed during the appointment, or even a combination of these options. There are various criteria and various actions that you can use simultaneously, so let’s get started.
Set up pricing
To begin defining your price rules, go to Configure > Resources/Services and click on the link “Set up pricing” under Price to access the Pricing Details page.
When creating advanced price rules in your resource schedule, it is not uncommon to set a base price first. This will be the standard price that is assumed for any appointment at any given date and time. You do not need to do this in a capacity or service schedule.
Create your price rule
Just below the “base price” field, you can find all existing pricing rules. Assuming you have not created any yet, this area should be empty. Below that, you will find a pricing example for the rules you have set up. You can change the date and time for this example to test if your rules are working as expected.
The next section is where the fun begins. Here you will construct your pricing rule(s). For this example, we want to set a pricing rule that gives your users a 20% discount if they book in the last two weeks before your lesson, and there are enough places (at least 10 places) left. If you need a certain number of students to attend for the class to take place, this price rule might convince doubters to reserve a seat.
Determining the “action” of your price rule
The first part of your pricing rule will consist the “action”, or rather, how you want to influence the price your users will have to pay upon making the appointment. You can set a price, increase/decrease your price, round to multiples of, make certain dates/times unavailable, set a deposit, add a field and stop evaluating the rules altogether. For a more in-depth explanation of each action, as well as a tutorial on how to get started, please refer to our Advanced pricing documentation.
We will select the “decrease price by %” action, then set the percentage to 20%.
Setting conditions that need to be met to trigger action
The second part of your pricing rule sets the conditions that need to be met. Keep in mind that all conditions you set will have to be met for the pricing rule to be applied. In other words, the system will not apply the pricing rule if one or more of the conditions (date, time, length, quantity, weekday, space left, user group, and time until start) are not met.
Once you select the start of any condition, one or more additional fields will appear. For the “date” condition, for example, you can enter the needed date range to trigger the action. You can change the price for a specific user group, or even make a resource, date or time completely unavailable if a user belongs to a specific user group. You can find more about this in our next blog, where we explore the power of using user groups.
In this case, the price will only be decreased by 20% if “the space left is equal to or more than 10 reservations” and “the time until start is less than 14 days”.
Adding multiple actions and removing pricing rules
Once you have set the conditions to trigger your price rule action, you can click save changes. If you need multiple price rules, simply click “save changes” to add a pricing rule and begin working on the next one.
If one of your pricing rules is not working as expected or if a pricing rule is no longer needed, just click on the red “X” to the right of the pricing rule you wish to get rid of. The pricing rule disappears, and a small reminder pops up telling you to save your changes so the change is applied.
Did you stumble upon this blog by chance, but are you ready to start online scheduling? Create a SuperSaaS account here. For questions about this blog’s topic, or anything else related to SuperSaaS, please reach out to our support team.