Pricing Formulas
Price from cost automatically, per channel, with tiered margins and MAP enforcement — and a review queue so a bad supplier feed can't reprice your catalog behind your back.
Who this is for
Anyone who owns margin — pricing managers, merchandisers, owners. Especially useful if supplier costs move often and you're currently repricing in a spreadsheet.
What you'll have when you're done
A rule per channel that recalculates sell prices when cost changes, respects your MAP obligations, rounds to prices that look deliberate, and holds every change for approval before it goes live.
How a price gets calculated
Four steps, in order. Knowing the order explains almost every "why is this price what it is?" question:
cost
→ pick the tier the cost falls into
→ apply (cost × multiplier) + adder
→ apply MAP policy
→ apply rounding
= sell price
Rounding runs last, after MAP. That ordering matters: it means a rounded price can land a cent below MAP, so if you have strict MAP obligations, prefer rounding modes that move upward.
One rule per channel
Each sales channel gets at most one pricing rule. That's the unit of configuration — your wholesale channel and your retail storefront each carry their own margins, and the same product prices differently on each without any duplication.
Scoping a rule
A rule can be limited to specific brands or categories. Leave both empty and it covers everything on the channel. Use scoping when one brand's margin expectations differ from the rest — a premium line carrying different markup than your house brand.
Enable and disable
Rules can be switched off without being deleted. Useful during a promotion when you want prices held still, or while you're testing a new tier structure.
Tiers: margin that varies by cost
A flat markup across a catalog rarely works. A 2.5× multiplier is sensible on a $4 clip and absurd on a $900 turbocharger. Tiers let margin taper as cost rises.
Each tier has a max cost ceiling, a multiplier, and an adder. Foundry picks the first tier whose ceiling the cost falls under. The last tier should have no ceiling — that's your catch-all for everything above the highest band.
| Max cost | Multiplier | Adder | $10 cost → |
|---|---|---|---|
| $25 | 2.50 | $0.00 | $25.00 |
| $100 | 1.80 | $5.00 | — |
| (none) | 1.35 | $15.00 | — |
The adder is where you recover fixed per-unit costs — handling, packaging, payment fees — that don't scale with price. On low-cost items a pure multiplier often doesn't cover the cost of shipping the thing.
Always define a catch-all
If your highest tier has a ceiling and a cost lands above it, there's no tier to apply. Leave the top tier's max cost empty so every cost has a home — including the expensive new line someone adds next quarter without telling you.
MAP enforcement
Minimum Advertised Price is a floor your supplier contractually requires. Breaching it risks your dealership, so Foundry treats it as policy rather than a suggestion. Three modes:
Floor — the default
Use the formula result, but never go below MAP. If your formula produces $89 and MAP is $99, the price is $99. This is what most merchants want: price freely above MAP, never breach it.
Use MAP
Price at MAP whenever one is set, falling back to the formula when it isn't. Choose this when you've decided to match the advertised floor across a brand rather than compete above it.
Ignore
Formula only; MAP isn't considered. Legitimate for channels where MAP doesn't apply — wholesale, or a marketplace outside the agreement's scope. Be certain before selecting it on a public storefront.
Rounding
A formula produces $47.3182. Rounding turns that into a price that looks chosen rather than computed.
| Mode | $47.3182 → |
|---|---|
| None | $47.32 |
| Nearest .99 | $47.99 |
| Nearest .95 | $47.95 |
| Nearest .49 | $47.49 |
| Round up | $48.00 |
| Custom | Nearest multiple you specify |
Because rounding runs after MAP, .49 and .95 can round a price down below a MAP floor. If you're under strict MAP terms, use round-up or .99 — or verify the edge cases on your MAP-covered brands before going live.
The review queue
Recalculating doesn't change any live price. It produces proposed price changes that wait for a human. Each carries the current price, the computed price, the cost before and after, and whether MAP was applied.
Pending → Approved → Applied
or Rejected · or Failed, if the channel push errors
Approving marks a change as sanctioned. Applying is a separate step that writes prices and pushes them to the channel. Both are deliberate — a supplier feed with a decimal error shouldn't be able to reprice your catalog while you sleep.
Preview before you commit
Preview a rule to see what it would produce without generating anything. Use it while tuning tiers — it's the fast loop.
Read the queue before bulk-approving
Sort by the size of the change. A handful of large swings are worth opening individually; a long tail of cent-level moves rarely is. The large ones are where a bad cost import shows itself.
Failed changes
A change that was applied but rejected by the channel is marked failed with the error. The price stays as it was — Foundry doesn't record a price the channel never accepted.
Rolling this out safely
Start with one brand
Scope your first rule to a single brand or category. Get the tiers right on a set you know well before pointing it at the whole catalog.
Reverse-engineer your current margins
Take a sample across your cost range and work out the effective multiplier you're already charging. Build tiers that roughly reproduce today's prices, then adjust deliberately. Starting from theory produces a queue of thousands of changes nobody will review.
Expect a large first batch
The first recalculation touches everything in scope. That's normal and it's exactly why the queue exists. Work through it once and subsequent runs are small — only what cost actually moved.
Get cost right first
Formulas are only as good as the cost feeding them. If supplier costs are stale or missing, fix that before switching pricing on — see Catalog Management.
Common problems
Some products get no proposed price
Usually one of three things: the product has no cost, it falls outside the rule's brand/category scope, or its cost lands above your highest tier and there's no catch-all. Check for a missing top tier first — it's the easiest to overlook.
Prices came out below MAP
Either the mode is set to Ignore, or rounding moved the price down after the MAP floor was applied. Switch to round-up on MAP-covered brands.
I approved changes but prices didn't move
Approving and applying are separate steps. Approved changes sit until applied — run apply for that channel.
A cost change didn't produce a proposal
Confirm the rule is enabled and the product is in scope, then trigger a recalculation for the channel. If the recomputed price rounds to the same value it already has, no change is proposed — that's correct behavior, not a miss.
Next
- • Catalog Management — getting supplier costs accurate first
- • Purchasing & Receiving — where cost enters the system
- • Sales channels — where prices are pushed