Integration: Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing allows for the price of items in recommendations to be determined in real time, ensuring that the price of a product on the item page will match the value the user saw in the recommendation. Dynamic pricing is required by some merchants for whom price updates via the data feed are not sufficient. This requires effort from both Algonomy and the merchant.
Usage
As each merchant and site integration is slightly different and because of the coordination required from both the merchant and Algonomy each dynamic pricing integration is unique. The details must be worked out with your Algonomy technical contact. However, all consist of three high level steps.
1. Determine how Algonomy will pass recommended products to a merchant
Best practice is to define a JavaScript function owned by the merchant that accepts an array of product IDs. This function will be called once for all placements by Algonomy when the dynamic content is returned to the page.
2. Implement a client-side request that will retrieve prices for products from the server
Implementation of this method will depend on the implementation of step 1. This should involve an asynchronous request to the server that returns prices for the products specified. Upon successful response from the server it should initial logic for step 3.
3. Determine how the product price will be updated
Either Algonomy or merchant must must write logic for updating the placements HTML with the price information. If the merchant is to own this logic HTML element IDs or some other identifier should have been passed in step one. If Algonomy is to own this logic the prices returned in step 2 must still be associated to the productIds.