Best-Practice Approach to End-to-End Retail Price Management

The retail landscape is saturated with endless product launches and an ever-expanding list of disruptive competition. The quickest way to stand out from the crowd is by delivering the right products to the right consumers, at the right time … for the right price.

This guide outlines the best practices for a complete, end-to-end pricing workflow solution – from initial price setting through in-season pricing, promotions and markdowns, all within one seamless process. Read on to learn:

• 3 steps to streamline price management
• How 5 pricing processes + 4 roles = 1 collaborative strategy
• Retailer types that benefit from end-to-end pricing management

Plus, dive into a real-world use case about how to leverage AI-driven solutions for price management success.

• Win in retail with a smarter, end-to-end pricing strategy
• Pricing as a driver for long-term business strategy and growth
• Five pricing processes, one pricing strategy
• End-to-end pricing workflow
• Sports retailer case study and business impact
• About Centric Software

The retail landscape is more competitive than ever, with endless new product launches and a surge of disruptive players entering the market. The quickest way to stand out from the crowd is by delivering the right products to the right consumers, at the right time … for the right price.

Pricing is one of the most powerful levers to differentiate from the competition; however, given the chaos of the current market, there are so many external factors to consider:

• How to respond to tariffs and disruption?
• How to price around increasingly scarce items?
• What’s the competitive pricing landscape for common SKUs?

A successful retail pricing strategy goes beyond setting a price tag. Instead, it is about building an integrated approach that drives margin growth, market share and brand perception. When consumers believe they’re getting fair value, it fosters loyalty and enhances the overall customer experience—key drivers of long-term profitability.

This guide outlines best practices for implementing an end-to-end pricing workflow—from initial price setting through in-season pricing, promotions and markdowns—all within one connected, agile process.

A long-term pricing strategy does more than support strong brand positioning—it also plays a key role in enhancing the overall consumer experience. By ensuring consistent value across the consumer journey, businesses acquire new consumers, retain current consumers and foster brand loyalty.

Increasing market presence and remaining competitive in a quickly changing industry to gain market share is critical. In addition, investing in strengthening pricing to support increased margins and financial health is essential to long-term business growth.

Price Management from Centric Software® is the only end-to-end retail platform that seamlessly governs internal and external data, ensuring pricing efficiency, margin protection and brand elevation, across all markets—from defining to setting, getting and managing the pricing policy to grow stronger and smarter.

3 steps to streamline price management with Centric Software

The first step is building the foundation and defining a strategy to understand:

• How to price against competitors.
• How to consider all variable exchange rates.
• How to manage tariffs.

Defining the price and defining the strategy with initial pricing available via initial pricing.

The second step is in pre-season and involves setting up initial prices against the competition. This means taking the landed costs, or the prices that come from product lifecycle management (PLM), for instance, then using market data via market intelligence to incorporate competitive pricing to really align and adapt a brand strategy.

The third step takes place during the in-season process. With lifecycle pricing, retailers and brands optimize prices and set up the optimal promotional strategies in season and in various countries

While the goal is to develop one pricing strategy that drives margin growth and market share, successful price management is typically built around five steps:

1. Define the pricing strategy: Establish your overall pricing objectives and positioning.
2. Set the prices: Determine central or local reference pricing.
3. Get the price: Translate the central price into the localized markets.
4. Monitor the price: Track market conditions and competitor pricing in real time.
5. Manage the price: Adjust pricing and promotions based on performance and competition.

The first three steps occur pre-season, laying the groundwork for pricing execution—ensuring alignment between central strategy and local markets.

The last two steps take place in-season, where real-time responsiveness becomes key. Monitoring the price (or looking at what competitors are doing) and then managing the price by setting up optimal prices and optimizing promotions to stay competitive and maximize sell through.

Pricing is not the responsibility of a single team—it spans multiple functions. An effective pricing strategy requires cross-functional collaboration between four core roles, each contributing a critical perspective to pricing decisions.

Here’s a snapshot of how one leading outdoor retailer structures pricing collaboration across its organization

Who benefits from end-to-end price management? Retailers that are:

• Multi-currency
• Multi-category
• Duty-free and duty-paid
• Challenger in the market, looking to expand footprint, positioning and market share
• Luxury retailers with global price power
• Global brands
• Fast-fashion retailers

“We were able to increase the gross profit by 5%, which is even more than we normally achieve. This is proof-of-principle that Centric Pricing & Inventory’s AI can be used very efficiently for dynamic pricing.”
—Rudolf Wöhrl SE

Price management from Centric Software is a complete, end-to-end pricing workflow—from initial price setting through in-season pricing, promotions and markdowns—all within one seamless process.

There are 5 pricing capabilities that Centric Software supports:

1| Price Management: Centralize and streamline pricing strategies across channels, regions and product hierarchies. Enable teams to plan, simulate and execute pricing decisions aligned with business goals and margin targets.
Benefits:

• Enable governance and transparency across all pricing actions
• Reduce manual effort and pricing errors
• Drive consistency across markets, brands and channels
• Support faster time to market for price updates and launches

2| AI Forecasting for Pricing Pre-Season: Leverage artificial intelligence to predict demand and price sensitivity before the season starts. Optimize initial price points and markdown strategies with data-backed insights to maximize revenue and sell through.
Benefits:

• Set data-backed pre-season prices aligned with margin goals
• Improve first price-right outcomes and reduce markdown reliance
• Increase alignment between merchandising, pricing, and planning
• Strengthen confidence in initial pricing decisions

3| AI Competitive Pricing: Stay ahead of market trends by dynamically analyzing competitor prices. Respond in real time to market shifts and maintain price positioning to drive consumer value and profitability.
Benefits:

• Improve competitiveness through automated price benchmarking
• React faster to competitor moves without manual analysis
• Protect margin while maintaining market positioning
• Reduce time and effort spent on competitive price monitoring

4| Lifecycle Pricing: Manage pricing across the entire product lifecycle—from launch to markdown to clearance. Use analytics and automation to optimize pricing at each stage and reduce margin erosion.
Benefits:

• Increased profitability by increased margins of up to 18%
• Enhanced decision making with automation of decisions, allowing for faster responses to market changes
• Improved inventory management

5| Market Intelligence: Gather and analyze external market data, including consumer trends, competitor activity and economic indicators. Empower pricing strategies with actionable insights to stay relevant and competitive.
Benefits:

• Make informed decisions based on real-time market intelligence and competitor insights.
• Gain visibility into competitors’ pricing, assortment strategies, and market trends, allowing for effective benchmarking.
• Identify potential market threats and opportunities, enabling proactive adjustments to strategies and product offerings.

Manage pricing workflows across the organization with a centralized interface to define rules, streamline collaboration and execute consistent pricing across markets and product groups.

A well-known outdoor retailer with hundreds of stores around the world—and a product assortment of almost entirely private-label brands—was looking to enhance its pricing strategies and capabilities to address the increasing complexity of retail and the evolving competitive landscape. It had several problems it needed to solve:

• Set the initial price range at a level that aligns with consumer expectations
• Grow its range of premium products
• Build a relevant offer on both the local and global levels

The company also needed to standardize the pricing processes and capabilities that were not harmonized and therefore prevented the outdoor retailer from being effective at deploying new business models, like reselling second-hand sports gear, for example. How was it able to achieve these goals?

First, by defining the foundational strategy:

• How to price against competitors
• How to take into account the different exchange rates
• How to manage tariffs

Pre-season

• Set up initial prices
• Benchmark prices with competitors
• Adapt brand positioning

In-season (lifecycle pricing):

• Price optimization
• Promotional strategies

Benefits

• Standardize pricing processes and capabilities in a highly scalable platform
• Enable price elasticity across a complex omnichannel model
• Price consistency between local and global
• High user adoption with an easy-to-use and flexible platform
• Deploy complex new business models (used sporting equipment)
• AI-driven for faster and smarter decision making

Value-added benefits: Once the pricing strategy was streamlined and key tasks were automated, the outdoor retailer was able to shift their focus to higher-value activities, like refining business rules and making data-driven strategic decisions. By adapting the historical data to reflect current sales trends to predict future events, teams can build and test different what-if scenarios, enabling better decision making without disrupting the business.

Scenarios allow for retailers and brands to change business rules to be more profit optimized or more stock optimized—to test a more aggressive hit in margin if there’s a lot of stock on hand, for example.

Demand influencing also becomes possible when companies set a business rule like “I want my product always to be 5% cheaper than the one from my reference competitor group.” This not only eliminates the manual process but also accelerates building a competitive advantage in a scalable way.

Similarly, Josef-Bernd Oswald, Product and Merchandise Manager at Leder & Schuh Group, explains how the Austrian footwear company is boosting its margins with AI-powered Centric Pricing & Inventory™:

“We have reduced our price reductions by about 2.5%. That translates into a 1% margin increase, which, on a 300 million-euro turnover, is a 3 million-euro increase to our bottom line. That’s quite a lot; more than we were expecting at the beginning of the project.”

Centric Software® (centricsoftware.com)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides an innovative and AI-enabled product concept-to-commercialization platform for retailers, brands and manufacturers of all sizes. As experts in fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to plan, design, develop, source, comply, buy, make, price, allocate, market, sell and replenish products.

• Centric PLM™, the leading PLM solution for fashion, outdoor, footwear and private label, optimizes product execution from ideation to development, sourcing and manufacture, realizing up to 50% improvement in productivity and a 60% decrease in time to market.
• Centric Planning™ is an innovative, cloud-native, AI solution delivering end-to-end planning capabilities to maximize retail and wholesale business performance, including SKU optimization, resulting in an up to 110% increase in margins.
• Centric Pricing & Inventory™ leverages AI to drive margins and boost revenues by up to 18% via price and inventory optimization from pre-season to in-season to season completion.
• Centric Market Intelligence™ is an AI-driven platform delivering insights into consumer trends, competitor offers and pricing to boost competitivity and get closer to the consumer, with an up to 12% increase in average initial price point.
• Centric Visual Boards™ pivot actionable data in a visual-first orientation to ensure robust, consumer-right assortments and product offers, dramatically decreasing assortment development cycle time.
• Centric PXM™, AI-powered product experience management (PXM) encompasses PIM, DAM, content syndication and digital shelf analytics (DSA) to optimize the product commercialization lifecycle resulting in a transformed brand experience. Increase sales channels, boost sell through and drive margins.

Centric Software’s market-driven solutions have the highest user adoption rate, customer satisfaction rate and fastest time to value in the industry. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition, appearing regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.

Centric Software is a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), the world leader in 3D design software, 3D digital mock-up and PLM solutions.

Centric Software is a registered trademark of Centric Software, Inc. in the US and other countries. Centric PLM, Centric Planning, Centric Pricing & Inventory, Centric Market Intelligence, Centric Visual Boards and Centric PXM are trademarks of Centric Software, Inc. All third-party trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners.