The Omnibus Directive and Historic Best price

The Omnibus Directive and Historic Best price

The EU Omnibus Directive on pricing transparency has recently been introduced and it has widespread implications for both B2C ecommerce and digital consumer services throughout the european union. Amongst other things, it sets new requirements for transparent pricing in e-commerce and means that online stores must display pricing history from the last 30 days if a product has been, or will be - discounted or given a promotional price. Moreover, the original price of the product must have been made public at least 30 days before it is discounted or put on sale.

There are two exceptions to this rule

The requirement does not apply to discounts targeted at a limited number of consumers, such as loyalty offers or vouchers limited to one customer as compensation for example For promotions live for 60 days or more, there is no need to update the lowest past price during the campaign, even if the price is lowered further What this means for Centra Clients and Front-end Agencies As stores will need to present both the current discounted price, and the lowest price a product has had over the previous 30 days we suggest using the “priceBeforeDiscount” field already exposed in our API’s.

This field contains the original price of the product before applying campaign or voucher discounts. The price in this field is static and is not subject to price manipulation.

Additionally, price list prices for products that have already been discounted in a given 30 day period must be updated with the lowest price from the previous campaign before discounting again. This action will update the priceBeforeDiscount field as above, and therefore the correct lowest price is still displayed to shoppers.

Support for displaying lowest price in 30 days in the DTC stores

Centra’s Shop and Checkout API now expose an additional field with the lowest product price called lowestPrice that will expose the lowest price that the product has had during the last 30 days as a result of pricelist price changes and applied campaigns, so that it can be displayed in the frontend store following the EU Omnibus directive. To read more about how it works in the API's follow this link