Product change - Restricting Currencies to only one per Application for all Norce [Storm] clients

Last changed: 2022-03-04

A coming restricting change to Norce [Storm] functionality, no date set.

Background

Today it is possible to set up multiple currencies for an application in the Admin UI. This makes it possible to use different price lists, with different currencies on the same application. However, this adds many possible unwanted results, which makes is difficult to foresee all possible behaviors of the pricing, campaign, promotion and rounding functionality. It is also very different how our clients want this to work specifically for them and their business.

Let's say, for example that an application has price lists in both SEK and EUR. How this should behave when prices are compared between a standard price list, campaign price list, and a member price list, different rounding rules, add to that promotion effects of discounts in one of the currencies, etc. The complexities are endless, and it is not only hard to maintain clear and understandable documentation of the functionality, transparency, and preview of the possible price calculations in admin for us, but it is also hard for our clients to be able to maintain business logic in Norce that behaves in an expected manner for the administrators. This adds to the frustration and questions to our partners and us and even when the system works as designed, it adds insecurity and uncertainty.

Decision

What Norce [Storm] has decided is to remove some of the flexibility of the platform, by restricting the number of valid currencies to only one per Application in Norce. We believe that this will remove many of the problems described above, make it possible to understand and anticipate how the pricing will turn out for all use cases, and lessen the amount of uncertainty and questions to our partners and to ourselves. Although, this change will also remove some of the flexibility of the platform, particularly for clients who work with a multi-market business, we think that the pros outweigh the cons (see consequences below).

What this change will mean in practice:

In the Admin UI

• Only possible to add one currency to an application setting
• Only possible to add price lists with the same currency as "public" or "primary" to the application
• Warning or restrictions to adding price lists to customers and companies if they are application specific
• Not possible to set promotions effects, or amount requirements on other currencies than the application's

In Storm API

• “Best price” on products are calculated as before, but price lists with other currencies are ignored
• Baskets are only allowed to be created for the application currency

In Storm Connect

• Not possible to update prices with other currency than the one on the price list (error or warning in import)

Consequences

The most restricting use case is when you have inter-application spanning price lists, for example a campaign that should be applied to more than one Application. The solution is to create a similar campaign with the same price rules for each application instead.

Norce [Storm] will go through all our current clients and identify the ones who might have functionality that could be influenced by this change and contact them and their solution partners about this. We will help with suggestions on changes and workarounds, where and if needed.

Actions (and preliminary roadmap)

• Norce announce the coming change of functionality (this document) (March 22)
• Norce reach out to the partners and clients most affected (Q2 22)
• Restrictions in admin, changes to connect and the Storm API is implemented in lab (Q3 22)
• Restrictions moved to prod (Q3 22)

Product team