Documentation

Price Differentiation with Channels

Use “channels” to implement price discrimination for different markets. For example, post-paid agencies can sell at slightly higher prices to include their commission.

Free vs. Premium

Price differentiation is only available in the “Premium“ version.

About price differentiation

Everybody has experienced situations where the same service has different prices when offered by different providers. For example, a flight or a hotel room may have a different price on the internet than when booked at a travel agency. This is called price differentiation.

There are two common reasons to do this:

  1. Increasing the profit margin, depending on what customers are able and willing to pay in a certain context. For example, people who buy on the internet tend to be very price-sensitive, while people buying in stores are more spontaneous.
  2. Including costs of a distribution modell in the final price. For example, a distributor having a store downtown will usually have higher costs than an internet store, and will have to sell at higher prices.

Price differentiation with Tixys channels

Tixys supports price differentiation through channels. A channel is simply a category of prices and can be applied to users. It works like this:

  1. Create as many channels as you like in Administration area›Sale›Channels. (Only keep in mind that price tables with many channels can become very complex and hard to maintain.)
  2. Go to Administration area›Users›Companies and assign the channel to all users that the channel should apply to. You can also apply the channel to the company the user belongs to, and select (inherit) as the user’s channel.
  3. When creating or modifying price models (see “Defining prices for single-ride and multi-ride tickets”), make sure to enter prices for the new channel.

From this point, all agents with that channel assigned will sell tickets at the prices you’ve defined for them.

The “Standard” channel is the the default channel, and is already existent when creating a shop. It will be used for all online, agency and bus sales. Only if an agent (or, bus driver, for that matter) has a different channel assigned, they will sell at different prices.

If the price model for a certain connection do not contain prices for the agent’s channel, the agent will not be able to sell tickets on this relation. This is intended, because it allows making certain services available only on some channels.