New Kind of Dynamic Pricing in Public Beta

I'm excited to announce the public beta of a new feature on Logos.com: in-cart product overlap dynamic pricing!

Many of you are already familiar with dynamic pricing, which automatically adjusts the price of a product you don't own based on its overlap with resources you do own. You might think of this as ownership dynamic pricing or library dynamic pricing.

This new kind of dynamic pricing extends that same concept (of not paying twice for the same resource) to multiple overlapping products you don't own when you add them to your shopping cart at the same time. You might think of this as product overlap dynamic pricing or cart overlap dynamic pricing. This new kind of dynamic pricing treats the product that's the best value as if you owned it when calculating the price of the product that's the second best value, and so on.

The existing ownership dynamic pricing behavior and this new in-cart product overlap dynamic pricing work together, too. So if you own Logos 9 Silver and add Logos 9 Gold and Logos 9 Baptist Gold to your cart together, we'll adjust the prices based on BOTH what you already own AND their overlap with each other.

As I hinted above, we run the logic in the order of the highest bundling discount to the lowest bundling discount, which under most normal circumstances means that you'll pay the lowest possible price. It doesn't matter what order you add the items to your cart. It's based on the sum of the prices of the contained resources divided by the sale price. This means that under most normal circumstances, you don't need to worry about buying products in a particular order to get the best deal. It should just work.

While the main goal is to make it easier to buy overlapping products at the same time, we're releasing this feature to address three specific problems:

1. Missing Feature Set: Some users are getting into a state where they end up accidentally buying only a Logos 9 library without the corresponding feature upgrade, which creates confusion and requires help from our customer service team to address. This work helped us solve that problem.
2. Accidentally Double Purchasing Some Resources: Some users occasionally buy overlapping products in the same transaction and effectively pay twice for some resources. We try to catch these and offer a partial refund to the customer, but that's time intensive and subject to human error. This work keeps that from happening in the first place.
3. Buying Products "in the Right Order": Some users want to make sure to buy products in the right order to get the best deal and make every dollar go as far as possible. While this work doesn't solve every scenario, it does address many and make it much easier to buy overlapping products without worrying about doing it "in the right order." (There are some edge cases that we have some ideas on how to address and may be able to improve in the future. But for most normal scenarios it should just work.)

Because this is a significant new feature and we don't have everything fully dialed yet, we're releasing it as an opt-in public beta to give you the chance to try it and provide feedback on your experience, which will allow us to polish it further before releasing it to everyone.

If you'd like to participate, just follow the Intra-Cart Dynamic Pricing Beta group on Faithlife with the same account you use to shop on Logos.com and then add multiple overlapping products to your cart. If you'd like to turn the feature off, just stop following the group.

In its current state, you'll see a "Price dynamically reduced due to overlap with other items in your cart" message to let you know when you're benefiting from this overlap dynamic pricing. We don't yet tell you (a) by how much or (b) which product in your cart is contributing to the reduction. We'd like to expose more of this detail in the future, but we don't think that's essential for the first iteration since it helps us solve some real problems in its current state.

We'd also like to trigger a message when you remove an item from your cart that was causing the price of another item to be reduced, so you're not surprised when a price goes up. That's on our short list of improvements to make in the near future.

There's no indication if a product you're looking at in search or on a product page overlaps with something in your cart. We'd like to add that in the future, but that's a much more expensive improvement that'll have to wait for a version 2 of this feature.

Thanks for helping us test this new feature and providing feedback on your experience. We hope you find it to be a nice improvement to your shopping experience on Logos.com and our other ecommerce websites.