The organization I work at has some interesting requirements when it comes to pricing for online commerce.  Currently the developers write different 'pricing rules' and those rules can be applied to our items based on attributes of the items.For Example:  INPUTS: [cost, sug_retail, discontinued, warehouse_qty, orderable_qty, brand, type, days_available, shipping_rate, weight, map_protected, map_discount]  MATCH: brand=x, warehouse_qty > 1, discontinued=True, map_protected=False  SET: retail_price = (sug_retail * 0.95), offer_price1 = (cost * 1.25 + shipping_rate)I am looking to allow the merchandising team to have more control over the pricing and formulas - they are afterall technical enough to write excel formulas.I've been looking at writing a desktop application that uses something like numexpr http://code.google.com/p/numexpr/ or http://sympy.org/en/index.html to allow non-programmers to integrate their own logic into our pricing backend.We have multiple price-tiers we have to set, for multiple markets, so an elegant solution is needed.  It's getting frustrating for the dev team to continually tweak/manage all of the pricing rules (we sell over 200 brands in 3 markets). My question is; does this seem like a decent approach?  Can you think of a better way to parse string-mathematical-grammer?  Can you think of a different way for users to provide formula's to integrate into a automated pricing system?Does anyone know of any examples of existing applications that do this?Excel, and Access are out of the question - the volume of data we manipulate has already proven the need to automate it - now we just need some visibility into that automation.
Developing a Configurable Pricing Program
python;pricing;e commerce
For E-Commerce organizations agility is at the core of business efficiency.  Being ready for the ever-changing market and keeping pace with business requirements is more challenging and requires that careful selections be made in the development of user-configurable programs.Configurable programs incur a great risk to the organization if they do not implement, limit, expose business logic properly as to keep configuration inline with business constraints.There are good examples of configurable commerce solutions, the solutions are generic but offer a good suite of features for consideration.IBM's WebSphere Commerce Feature Pack 2 features this type of configurable integration.http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ieduasst/v1r1m0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.iea.wcs/wcs/7.0.0.2/BusinessUI/PriceRuleOverview/player.htmlThe rate of expected change at most E-Commerce companies requires areas of the Enterprise Architecture to be extremely stable, and configurable.  Pricing is unfortunately one of those areas, and without at least IT-Configurable rules, keeping pace with day-to-day  changes is impossible.  Having a single algorithm for pricing management becomes more suspect when you think about change-based updates.  When a master algorithm is updated, it means that ALL inputs, outputs, and intermediate variables must be recalculated even if the changes to the algorithm only affect 10% of the data set.  This fact alone suggests it is a flawed approach, and something more horizontally scalable must be considered.From a business perspective the lost opportunity cost of turning our backs on highly customizable and accessible pricing routines is also unacceptable.