Pricing Actions are optional business rules that modify the AI's suggestion, a way to layer your own logic on top of the AI output. Think of them as "after the AI recommends a price, also do this." They're applied in order, with the output of one feeding into the next.
There's an important limitation that's easy to miss: inside a Price Optimization strategy, only two action methods actually run. If you configure any other action on an optimization strategy, it's simply not applied: it doesn't change the price and it doesn't raise an error.
The two actions that apply
Action | What it does |
Change Price | Adjusts the suggested price by a fixed amount or percentage. |
Add or Subtract | Adjusts the suggested price (or a named attribute such as cost) by a fixed amount or percentage. |
Worked examples:
Change Price: "Add €2 to every AI suggestion" (fixed), or "Increase the AI suggestion by 5%" (percentage).
Add or Subtract: "Take 10% off the AI suggestion" (percentage on the suggested price), or, when a cost attribute is available on the product, "Set the price to cost + 40%."
The actions that are skipped
The following actions have no effect inside an optimization strategy:
Action | Applied during optimization? |
Set Base Price | No |
Match Competitor | No |
Match Price Position | No |
Set Market Value | No |
Set AI Optimal Price | No |
Set to Internal Value | No |
There are two reasons for this. First, the optimization flow only executes Change Price and Add or Subtract by design. Second, the optimization flow doesn't load any competitor or market data, so even the competitor- and market-based actions would have nothing to work with. That's why matching a competitor or a market statistic can't be used to pull an optimized price toward a rival's.
What to do instead
For a pure AI optimization strategy, you usually don't need any pricing actions at all: the AI is already doing the pricing.
If you do use actions here, keep them to Change Price and Add or Subtract, since those are the only two that take effect.
If you need a hard margin floor or price cap, don't rely on a pricing action for it. Use Safeguards (see How to Add Safeguards to Your Pricing Strategy), which are always enforced, or Profit Protection. A pricing action meant to enforce a floor would be skipped in the optimization flow.
If a business rule couldn't be carried out (for example, an Add or Subtract that references an attribute a product doesn't have), it appears in the results under "failed actions" so you can see exactly what didn't run.