Tier pricing and group pricing are Magento’s built-in B2B pricing levers: sell more, pay less per unit; belong to the right customer group, see better prices. Simple mechanisms - but the strategy around them decides whether they grow volume profitably or quietly leak margin. Here is how they work and how to think about them.
The Mechanisms
Tier pricing: per-product quantity breaks - 1-9 units at £10, 10-49 at £9, 50+ at £8. Defined per product, optionally per customer group, as fixed price or percentage discount. The tier grid shows on the product page, nudging buyers up a bracket.
Group pricing: a product price per customer group - Trade customers see £8.50 where guests see £12. Group price is essentially a tier with quantity 1 for that group.
Both are product-level price index data: resolved at index time, displayed everywhere prices show, and combinable with catalog price rules (lowest price wins by default).
Strategy: Where the Margin Goes
The mistakes are strategic, not technical:
- Tiers set from cost-blind percentages: “10 percent off at 10 units” applied catalogue-wide ignores that margins vary 5x across your range. Tier by category margin profile, not globally
- Bracket cliffs that invite gaming: a 50-unit price below your true landed cost gets exploited by buyers who resell. Sanity-check the bottom tier against real cost + minimum margin
- Too many brackets: three tiers communicate; seven confuse. Every extra bracket is a line the buyer’s procurement spreadsheet has to model
- Group prices drifting from tiers: when both exist on a product, know which wins for your trade group - and make it deliberate
The Interaction Matrix
Tier/group prices interact with other pricing engines in defined ways:
- Catalog price rules: the lower of rule price and tier price applies
- Cart price rules: apply on top - a trade buyer with a tier price and a coupon stacks both unless you exclude it in rule conditions
- Shared catalogs (Adobe Commerce B2B): replace product pricing for members entirely - do not maintain tier prices for products under shared catalog pricing; the models conflict conceptually
Audit the stack per segment: what does a Gold trade customer actually pay on your top 20 SKUs, through every layer? If you cannot answer in one spreadsheet, your pricing has emergent behaviour you did not design.
Import and Maintenance
Tier prices import via the standard product import format or API (/V1/products/{sku}/tier-prices) - for ERP-driven pricing, sync them as deltas with the price feed rather than hand-editing. The API supports replace operations per SKU, which keeps two-system sync honest.
Tier and group pricing are boring mechanisms with outsized commercial effect. Set them from margin data, keep brackets legible, audit the full stack per segment - and they will drive volume at margins you actually chose.