Amrod pricing tiers, and why your cost is your own

This matters more than it sounds, because it rules out the way a lot of promotional-products websites are built.

Amrod grades its resellers

Amrod operates a tiered loyalty programme. Resellers sit somewhere on a ladder of levels named after stones, entering at Jade and rising through further levels to Tanzanite at the top, and the level a reseller holds affects the cost price they are charged along with other account conditions.

Amrod sets the criteria and the benefits, and it can change them. Check your own level and what it entitles you to with Amrod directly rather than relying on any third party, this page included.

What matters for a website is the consequence rather than the detail: your cost price is specific to your account.

The API returns your prices, not a price list

When a website reads Amrod's API using your credentials, the prices that come back are the prices for your account.

That is exactly the right behaviour, and it removes a job. There is no price list to maintain, no annual update to apply, and no risk of quoting off a stale spreadsheet. If your tier improves, your costs drop at the next sync and your selling prices follow whatever rules you have set.

It also means a website built for one reseller cannot simply be copied to another with the data left in place. Each reseller's site has to read that reseller's own account.

Why a shared price list is the wrong foundation

Some catalogue websites are built by exporting a price list once and loading it in. It works on the day it is done.

After that it drifts. Amrod changes prices, the export does not. Your tier changes, the export does not. Somebody eventually notices a quote that does not match the invoice, and by then nobody is sure which figures on the site are still true.

A site that reads the API against your own account has neither problem. It is not a convenience, it is the difference between a catalogue that stays correct and one that quietly stops being correct.

Setting margin on top of a cost that moves

Because cost is a moving number, markup should be expressed as a rule rather than as a typed selling price.

A single percentage across a whole catalogue is the obvious approach and it is commercially wrong. Apparel is compared closely by buyers who know what a golf shirt costs. Branded giftware is not compared in the same way. The same margin cannot be right for both.

What works is markup resolved by rule, in order of precedence: a rule for a brand, then a rule for a category, then a default for everything else. On top of that, volume breaks that reduce the markup as quantity rises, and a floor the reduction can never go below so a large order cannot become an unprofitable one.

Set that up once and it keeps applying as costs move underneath it.

Keep your cost prices off the page

Your buying price is commercially sensitive. Competitors would like it, and so would your customers.

Three habits keep it where it belongs.

• Calculate on the server. Work out the selling price where the cost lives, and send only the selling price to the browser.
• Recalculate every quote when it arrives. Treat prices submitted by a browser as display values and throw them away. Look up the cost again, apply the rules again, and use that. A tampered request then changes nothing.
• Strip cost out of anything stored. A saved quote does not need the cost price in it, and a stored record has a habit of being exported later.

Questions people ask

Do all Amrod resellers pay the same price?

No. Amrod places resellers on a loyalty ladder and the position on it sets the cost price, so two resellers buying the same item can pay different amounts.

Can I see another reseller cost price?

No. The API returns prices for the account making the call, so a website connected to your account sees your prices and nobody else.

Does my website expose my cost price?

It should not, and on a properly built site it does not. Cost prices belong on the server, are used to calculate the selling price there, and are stripped out of anything stored or sent to the browser.

What happens to my website if my tier changes?

Nothing you have to do. The next sync pulls the new cost prices and your markup rules apply on top, so selling prices move on their own.