B2B Price List Leakage After Multi-Store Expansion
A distributor runs one Adobe Commerce instance with three websites: retail (USD), wholesale (USD), and Canada wholesale (CAD). Wholesale customers are assigned to a shared customer group with a 12% catalog price rule. Last quarter the merchandiser created a new shared catalog for the Canada wholesale website and assigned 40 SKUs, but left the original customer group rule active. Finance reports that Canadian wholesale invoices show retail prices on 18 of those 40 SKUs, while 22 show the expected wholesale price. The 18 affected SKUs were all recently re-imported via a CSV that did not include the price attribute scope for the Canada website. The client wants a fix before a contract renewal in three weeks and is asking whether to delete the catalog price rule entirely.
1. Diagnose why only a subset of SKUs shows retail pricing, and explain the interaction between shared catalogs and catalog price rules that the merchandiser misunderstood.
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The split (18 wrong, 22 right) points to a per-SKU data problem, not a global rule misconfiguration. The 18 SKUs were re-imported without their Canada-website price scope, so their website-scoped price fell back to the default scope value. Shared catalogs control which products and at what custom price a group sees, but they do not override a missing or default-scoped base price on a given website - the catalog price rule then applies on top of whatever price resolves. The merchandiser assumed assigning a shared catalog would supersede the group price rule; in fact both mechanisms can stack, and the visible price depends on scope resolution per SKU. So the correct diagnosis is: (1) re-imported SKUs lost website-scoped pricing, and (2) the shared catalog did not insulate them from the legacy group rule. Deleting the rule would 'fix' symptoms but break the 22 correct SKUs and any other wholesale website relying on it.
2. The client proposes deleting the catalog price rule to stop the leakage. Give your recommendation and outline the corrective steps you would sequence before the renewal.
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Recommend against deletion as the primary fix. The rule is presumably serving other wholesale traffic; removing it changes pricing for customers who are currently correct and creates a new, larger incident. Instead:
- Contain: audit all 40 SKUs' price scope across all three websites; export and diff against intended wholesale prices. Identify every SKU missing Canada-website scope.
- Correct data: re-import the 18 SKUs with explicit website-scoped prices (or set scope via admin/API), validating a sample before full run.
- Resolve the stacking question deliberately: decide whether Canada wholesale should be priced by shared catalog custom prices or by the group rule - not both. If shared catalog is the intended source of truth, scope the group rule to exclude the Canada website (or the relevant group) rather than deleting it.
- Verify: place test orders per website/group and confirm invoice prices.
- Prevent: add price-scope to the import profile and a post-import validation check; document the pricing ownership model.
Sequence data correction before rule changes so you can isolate the effect of each change and prove correctness before renewal.