DIFFERENT STRATEGIES FOR RESOLVING PRICE DISCOUNT COLLISIONS

Managing Discounts is an essential task for all business applications. Discounts are used for turning prospects to new customers and for customer retention. However, if more than one discount type can be applied, a collision may arise. An example is a promotional discount and a discount for a customer. The system has to decide which discount should be applied, eventually also combinations are possible. A bad collision strategy can lead to annoyed customers as they do not get the price that they think is correct. This paper examines three different business applications designed for small and medium sized companies and shows the applied strategies for resolving discount collisions. Afterwards, a new way of defining discounts, called discount tree (dTree) is introduced. It is shown that with dTrees, collisions can be detected directly when the discounts are defined. A detected collision can then resolved by the administrator.