Skip to main content

Key Concepts

Quantaprice is built around a small set of capabilities that define how the service behaves and what makes it valuable in real-world pricing workflows. These concepts appear throughout the platform and form the foundation for all price evaluation.

Multi-Pricelist Architecture​

Quantaprice supports many pricelists in parallel — customer-specific lists, contract lists, campaign lists, regional lists, or internal list structures. Each pricelist can override only the fields it needs, while falling back to a parent list for everything else.

Key ideas:

  • Single-parent inheritance
  • Deterministic overrides
  • Works across millions of SKU x pricelist combinations
  • Compatible with scheduled updates and full history

This model allows complex pricing structures without sacrificing clarity or performance.

Scheduled Price Updates​

Any price update can be activated at a specific time in the future. This enables predictable, coordinated rollouts without manual midnight operations or last-minute deployments.

Uses include:

  • Contract changes taking effect on a specific day
  • Campaign pricing
  • Seasonal adjustments
  • Future corrections or planned overrides

Scheduled updates are applied automatically and consistently across all nodes.

Price Change History​

Quantaprice retains historical versions of prices with configurable retention. This makes it possible to understand not only the current price, but also how and when it changed.

Supported scenarios:

  • "Price as of date" queries
  • Debugging unexpected prices
  • Customer dispute resolution
  • Compliance and auditing

Historical pricing integrates with inheritance, bundles, and scheduled updates.

Bundle-Aware Pricing​

Quantaprice understands bundles as first-class objects. It supports both fixed-price bundles and component-based bundles, including mixed VAT scenarios and per-component overrides.

Behaviour includes:

  • Resolving component prices using normal price logic
  • Aggregating bundle totals deterministically
  • Applying VAT and rounding after bundle evaluation
  • Supporting inheritance in bundle definitions

Bundle pricing works seamlessly across large catalogs and complex price structures.

High-Performance Price Evaluation​

Quantaprice is designed to deliver fast, stable price evaluation — even for large catalogs, many pricelists, and complex structures such as bundles or quantity breaks.

The price calculation pipeline handles:

  • Multi-SKU evaluation
  • Multi-pricelist evaluation
  • Quantity breaks
  • Scheduled updates
  • "As of" timestamps
  • Inheritance and overrides
  • VAT and rounding

Performance remains predictable regardless of catalog size or pricing complexity.

Metadata-Driven Flexibility​

Articles and pricelists can include metadata: key-to-value fields used for internal organisation, segmentation, or optional pre-selection of SKUs before pricing.

Important: This is not a search engine or storefront filter. Metadata is intended for:

  • Article maintenance
  • Internal segmentation
  • Bulk operations
  • Optional SKU selection prior to pricing

It does not replace catalog search or product discovery in an e-commerce platform.

Asynchronous Processing​

Quantaprice is designed for high-throughput pricing operations. Because of this, the platform does not operate as a synchronous transactional database. It processes updates asynchronously, and changes become visible to queries after they have been written, indexed, and activated.

For most use cases this happens quickly, but it is intentionally eventually consistent, not immediately consistent.

What This Means in Practice​

  • Writes (upserts, deletes, scheduled changes) are placed on an internal queue.
  • Multiple worker threads apply these changes to the storage in batches.
  • Index updates and change events are included in the same write cycle.
  • Query operations continue to serve from the latest committed data.
  • Once a write is durably stored, it becomes visible to readers automatically.

The system is optimized for high write throughput, predictable read performance, and large datasets, rather than immediate atomic visibility of each update.

When to Use Scheduling​

Whenever changes are meant to take effect at a specific moment (contract updates, campaign starts, catalog refreshes, VAT adjustments), Quantaprice's Scheduled Updates provide a much better guarantee than issuing synchronous API updates "just before midnight."

Scheduling ensures:

  • precise activation times (to the millisecond),
  • predictable replicas,
  • consistent history,
  • and no dependency on runtime timing or external job execution.

When Immediate Consistency Is Needed​

For read-after-write workflows (e.g., testing a newly inserted price), Quantaprice provides two guarantees:

  1. Writes are durable as soon as they are acknowledged.
  2. They become query-visible immediately after the write worker has flushed the batch.

In practice this delay is small, typically in the millisecond range.

Summary​

These concepts — multi-pricelist architecture, scheduled updates, history, bundles, high-performance queries, metadata flexibility, and asynchronous processing — define how Quantaprice behaves. Together, they allow companies to manage complex pricing structures at scale while maintaining clarity, consistency, and operational reliability.