Historic prices
Historic prices are price changes as tracked by EVA over a certain period of time. By displaying these whenever your products are on sale, you can inform your customers, and ensure compliancy to regional legislation in the process.
The functionality surrounding historic prices is a work in progress, with new functionality being added in the coming releases. All additions to it will be announced via Core drop or regular drop and will be described on this page.
Some regions, such as the EU, have implemented regulations designed to better inform customers and prevent traders from artificially inflating prices ahead of a sales period.
These regulations essentially come down to the following: any sales price must be accompanied by a reference price, showing its lowest price during the last 30 days - as a minimum timeframe.
Our historic prices functionality allows you to adhere to such legislation by tracking prices automatically.
Currently there are two ways for you to make use of historic prices:
- The historical_prices PIM property;
- The response of the
GetProductDetailservice call.
These historic prices can be displayed alongside current sales prices (and only when having sales).
PIM property
PIM properties allow you to add/request specific data about certain products in EVA, as is done in this product information card.
You can also use PIM properties to allow for filtering of your products, as is done by adding the PIM property called Color to your products for example.
The same goes for historic_prices. This property will hold a product's lowest price for a certain amount of days (based on the setting).
A specific use-case for this PIM property however is still upcoming.
Service response
Aside from tracking products' historic prices in a PIM property, these prices are available via a response of the GetProductDetail service.
Whenever you call that service for a product with a price list with usage type Sales, the following two properties will be returned:
- HistoricalPrice
- HistoricalPriceInTax
Bear in mind that these properties are part of several layers of caching, and therefore may take some time to become visible.
This is currently the only proper use-case for historic prices, by allowing you to use these properties in your own front ends when displaying sales prices.
Relevant setting
You can choose the duration during which EVA should keep track of the lowest prices.
You can do so by entering a value between 30-90 (days) in the HistoricalPriceListCalculationPeriod setting.
Example
The following example shows you the prices of a product during certain periods, with the tracking period set to different values.
| Usage type | Date | Current price | Historic price | Setting value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Selling price | 01-01-2024 | 100 | Not shown | 90 |
| Sale price | 01-02-2024 | 70 | 100 | 90 |
| Selling price | 07-02-2024 | 90 | Not shown | 90 |
| Sale price | 15-02-2024 | 85 | 70 | 90 |
| Selling price | 21-02-2024 | 90 | Not shown | 30 |
| Sale price | 12-03-2024 | 80 | 85 | 30 |
Currently it is possible to introduce a lower price by means of discount, which is explicitly not a sale price. This means any price value below either the sale price or selling price, which was caused by a discount, is not included in historic prices.
Since this technically allows one to circumvent the safeguards this functionality offers, we'll soon be keeping track of the (lower) prices introduced by discounts as well.