How to manage price lists by product group in WooCommerce B2B

Target
In this article we will guide you step by step to learn how to use dedicated product prices per group quickly and easily. You will discover how to manage offering special offers to your customers and how to update a catalog of hundreds or thousands of products in just a few clicks, optimizing your time and resources.

Intro
One of the most used and appreciated features of WooCommerce B2B is certainly the possibility of offering customers different prices based on the group they belong to. Thanks to the power of groups, it is possible to categorize customers and offer dedicated offers based on the factors you prefer. Each product can therefore have as many prices as there are groups in your store. But how do you manage this scenario?

Step 1: a practical example

Let’s take a practical example, which will help you understand the use of group-specific pricing.
Suppose you have a customer group called “Resellers” and a particular product called “T-Shirt”, which has a price of $50.
You want to offer only your customers belonging to the “Resellers” group a special sale price, let’s say $40.

With group-specific pricing this becomes very simple! All customers on your site will see the price of “T-Shirt” at $50, but if a customer belonging to the “Resellers” group logs in, the price will magically drop to $40.

Step 2: enable dedicated group pricing

Suppose you have already created the group called “Resellers” to which you want to offer specific prices for the product “T-Shirt”. The first thing to do is to configure the group for this purpose, in the group edit page:

 Users -> All Groups -> Reseller

setting the “Price rules” option to “Show prices assigned to single product”.

Step 3: dedicated pricing overview

Now WooCommerce B2B expects to have specific prices for the “Resellers” group in the product, let’s go and see in the product edit page:

 Products -> All Product -> YOUR PRODUCT

Scrolling down to the “Product data” section, you will find the “Group options” of WooCommerce B2B.
In particular, in our example, you will find “Edit resellers group options” and inside it the “Group prices” section.

Here you can set the specific regular price for the “Resellers” group ($40, in our example) and an eventual sale price.

Easy, right?

Step 4: fallback to default price

You may be wondering: but what happens to all the other products where I have not entered a dedicated price for the “Resellers” group?
Don’t worry, WooCommerce B2B is able to verify the lack of a dedicated price for the customer group and will automatically use the default WooCommerce price ($50, in our example).

Step 5: bulk update

This feature is awesome, right? Now you can customize prices for your customers in a detailed and precise way, maximizing their satisfaction and loyalty and increasing sales and profits.
But wait a minute… If you have hundreds or thousands of products in your store, what happens if you need to change the prices or create a new group with its own prices? You don’t have to change one product at a time?

Of course not!

WooCommerce B2B integrates perfectly with WooCommerce’s default import/export tools, a very powerful tool that allows you to massively update thousands of products in just a few clicks, via CSV files.

You can find the import/export options in:

 Products -> All Products

placed right next to the “Add New” product button.

Step 6: create CSV file

To update products, or add new ones, you need a CSV file containing the information.
Then export the CSV file with your product information by clicking on “Export” in:

 Products -> All Products

and choosing in the wizard the fields and information you need to update.
Don’t forget the “ID” tag, you need it as an identifier that allows WooCommerce to match and understand which product to update!

Returning to the purpose of this guide (updating product prices by group), just make sure to export the fields related to the prices by group, in our case “Resellers”. The fields involved are regular and sale price, followed by the name of the group in round brackets:

• Regular price (Resellers)
• Sale price (Resellers)

The simplest thing is to write the name of the group in the search field in the “Which columns should be exported?” option, you will see all the fields related to that group appear, including the price ones.

Once the download is complete, open the file with a spreadsheet editor (OpenOffice, Google Drive Docs, LibreOffice, Microfost Excel, etc).
In this context, using the potential of the different editors, you can filter your data and make calculations, but above all modify the data to be updated.

Once you have finished editing, save your file, making sure it is in UTF-8 format.

Step 7: import CSV file

Click on the “Import” button in:

 Products -> All Products

and select “Choose file” to choose the CSV file you just saved.

Don’t forget to select the “Update existing products” option.

Go ahead in the wizard, until the import procedure starts, wait for the process to finish and that’s it!
All the products in the CSV file will be updated with the new information in one go!

Bonus: apply percentage discounts by category

WooCommerce B2B does not allow you to apply dedicated prices or discounts based on the category to avoid management issues. This is because WooCommerce allows you to apply more than one category to each product and in the case of multiple rules, unexpected discounts could be generated that are difficult to maintain over time.

But there is a simple solution to this too.

Using WooCommerce import/export tools, you can export the products and filter them by category. After that, in any spreadsheet editor, you just need to create a formula that derives the final price starting from the default price and applying a percentage. In this way, you will obtain the final sales price per group.

Further information

To familiarize yourself and learn more about the use of WooCommerce import/export tools, you can consult the official WooCommerce documentation, which is very detailed and full of examples:

WooCommerce: product CSV Importer and Exporter

To learn more about the use of Excel (or similar) regarding formulas and calculation of amounts based on percentages, you can take a look here:

Excel: format numbers as percentages