The upcoming 6.2 release of Elastic Path will include some big changes to price management. Currently, prices are a property of the product and live inside the catalog. This means the only way to have multiple prices for the same product is to use virtual catalogs. That's fine if you want to have different prices in different stores, but it doesn't help if you need to have multiple prices for the same product in the same store.

In 6.2, prices are getting lives of their own. They're moving out of catalogs.

There are several business and technical drivers behind this change:

• In many enterprises, different systems are used to manage pricing and catalog information. This means different update cycles and integration points.
• It is not uncommon to distribute responsibilities for maintaining pricing and catalog data between different departments or people.
• Online retailers want to have flexibility to price products differently for different customer segments. For example, you may want to offer better prices to registered users.
• The ability to support multiple price lists is especially important in B2B environments where prices can be determined by the contract with each business customer.
• By separating Price from Product, it would be possible to cache other product information in memory, which would significantly improve storefront performance.

In 6.2, all price information (price tiers, sale and list prices, etc.) is now stored in price lists. A price list contains prices in one currency only. If your store supports multiple currencies, you will need to create a separate price list for each currency.

There will be a new way to manage prices in Commerce Manager. There will be a Price List Manager activity that provides a way to manage a set of product prices from price list's perspective. Users will still be able to use the Pricing tab in the Product Editor to manage prices for a product, but under the hood, the prices are actually stored in multiple price lists, not in the Catalog.

Commerce Manager permissions have been extended to separate responsibilities for managing catalog from managing price information.

Separation of prices from catalogs is also reflected in EP's import/export features. When exporting catalogs using the Import-Export tool, the exported catalog data will not include price information anymore. Price lists will be imported and exported using Price List Import / Export instead. And in the Commerce Manager, it will be possible to import price lists in CSV format as well.

In 6.2 you will be able to define any number of price lists and use them with more than one catalog across multiple stores. Let's see how this works.

A Commerce Manager user associates a Price List with a Catalog by creating a Price List  Assignment (PLA).

Each PLA has a priority and, optionally, some targeted selling conditions that determine which shoppers are eligible for the price list. These conditions use the same tags that are used to determine which Dynamic Content shoppers see in the storefront. A Price List Assignment is very similar to a Dynamic Content Delivery. For more information, see the blog posts on the Tagging Framework and Dynamic Content.

Users can associate multiple Price Lists with a catalog by creating multiple Price List Assignments, each with different priorities and targeted selling conditions.

By evaluating PLA conditions against the shopper's tag set, EP builds a Price List Stack from Price Lists that meet the targeted selling conditions. Price Lists are arranged in the stack according to their priorities. To determine a product's price, the system goes through the Price Lists in the stack until it finds the first price list that contains a price for the product.This means that it is not required for a Price List to have prices for all products in the Catalog. If, for example, you have different people managing prices for different product categories, you can create separate price lists and assign them all to the same catalog.

Price management is a complex area, and required quite a bit of upfront design and refactoring many points of the application. Being able to leverage the Tagging Framework for Price List Assignment was a big help. A lot of customers are really looking forward to this, so it was definitely worth the effort. We have a couple other big features coming in 6.2 and I'll try to take a few moments to talk about them in the next couple weeks.