If you’ve ever walked into a store and seen a price tag that made you do a double take—either because it was way too high or suspiciously low—you’ve experienced the chaos of pricing strategies gone wrong. Now imagine that same confusion but on an enterprise level, where businesses juggle thousands of products, shifting market conditions, and customers who expect pricing precision at all times.
Pricing isn’t just about slapping a number on a product—it’s a science, an art, and, when done wrong, a major pain point.
And let’s be honest—if your pricing strategy still relies on manually adjusting trade agreements in D365 and spreadsheets to "keep track" of special customer discounts, it’s time to rethink your approach.
The Problem with Traditional Pricing in D365 F&O
Pricing challenges differ across industries, but they all boil down to one thing: managing price complexity efficiently without cutting into profit margins or alienating customers.
Here are some of the most common struggles companies face today.
Fragmented Pricing Structures – The Manufacturing Nightmare
Let’s say you’re a heavy equipment manufacturer supplying products to construction firms, government projects, and dealerships. Each group has different pricing models:
Government contracts have strict negotiated pricing terms.
Dealerships expect volume-based discounts.
Construction firms want flexible financing options.
With D365’s traditional pricing model, managing these different pricing structures often means creating multiple trade agreements—one for each customer or contract type.
Over time, this becomes an unmanageable spaghetti mess of agreements, leading to pricing errors, customer disputes, and lost revenue.
Impact: Manufacturers end up offering unintended discounts due to conflicting trade agreements. Pricing managers spend hours troubleshooting why a specific contract price wasn’t applied correctly.
Lack of Real-Time Adjustments – The Retail Struggle
Retailers rely on seasonal pricing, promotions, and competitor-based pricing to stay competitive. If a competitor slashes prices during a sale, a retail business using D365’s traditional trade agreement system has limited flexibility to adjust pricing on the fly.
Example: A fashion retailer wants to clear out winter coats in March with aggressive markdowns but doesn’t want to lower prices for customers who already have loyalty discounts applied.
In the current D365 trade agreement model, manually updating discounts across multiple store locations and online stores is cumbersome and prone to errors.
Impact: Without a real-time pricing engine, retailers miss out on timely promotional opportunities, leading to inventory buildup and lost revenue.
Disconnected Pricing Across Channels – The Wholesale Problem
Many companies operate multiple sales channels—direct sales, B2B e-commerce, and retail stores. The problem? Prices are often not synchronized, leading to inconsistencies that frustrate customers.
Example: A wholesale distributor of electrical components sells bulk orders through a customer portal and also supplies retail stores with negotiated pricing. However, the pricing team manually updates trade agreements in D365 for each channel separately.
Impact: A contracted customer who logs into the portal one day sees one price but receives a different price on their invoice because the latest updates haven’t been applied everywhere. This results in customer dissatisfaction, wasted admin time, and revenue leakage.
Overly Complex Discounting – The Food & Beverage Struggle
Food and beverage businesses work with a mix of promotional offers, rebates, and volume discounts, but the challenge is ensuring that discounts don’t stack in unintended ways.
A beverage distributor offers:
A seasonal 10% discount on bulk soda orders.
A loyalty discount for repeat restaurant clients.
A special rebate program for major grocery chains.
In a traditional trade agreement setup, these discounts might overlap incorrectly, leading to unintended double discounts that hurt margins.
Impact: The finance team is left scrambling to manually reconcile price discrepancies, eroding profitability.
Why Businesses Need a New Pricing Approach
With all these challenges, it’s clear that traditional pricing models aren’t keeping up with the modern business landscape. Companies need:
A more flexible way to structure pricing – allowing attributes like customer segment, product category, and market conditions to drive pricing decisions dynamically.
A real-time pricing engine – ensuring that market changes and competitive shifts can be reflected immediately.
A unified pricing model – eliminating pricing inconsistencies across e-commerce, retail, and wholesale channels.
Smarter discount and rebate management – avoiding overlapping discounts that hurt margins.
Dad Joke of the Day
"I tried to sell my vacuum cleaner… but it was just gathering dust."
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