Caliente Design Blog

So, I had a client today that would like to know how to set a custom price for some customers in their Magento store, so I figured I might as well make a page for it.

You have two paths for this type of problem, both involve creating a custom customer group, so lets start there.

1) “Admin” -> “Customers” -> “Customer Groups” then “Add New Customer Group”
2) “Customers” -> “Manage Customers” and manage the customers you want to add to the new group

Next, we need to decide if we want the discount to apply to some products, an entire category or brand of products, or on a per item basis. If you need to do the per item basis, then you will create custom prices in the product pages, and if you decide to go broader, you will need to create catalog price rules. I suppose you could do a third choice, that was a shopping cart price rule, and only alerted them of the discounts once added to the cart, but we will leave that for now.

Option 1: Per Item Basis
This is the easier method to implement, but of course if you want to apply this to several products, you will spend some time going through each product to update it with the new group price.

1) “Admin” -> “Manage Products”
2) Select the product you would like to set a custom price for
3) On the left item menu select “Prices”
4) Just under “Price” there is a box for “Add Group Price”
5) Add your new group, and set the group price, it will now be available to anyone that you add to that group, while they are logged in

Option 2: Catalog Price Rules
This is a slightly more complex approach, but works great when you have a large catalog of products, and want to issue an across the board discount to an entire brand at once.

1) “Admin” -> “Promotions” -> “Catalog Price Rules”
2) “Create New”
New Rule Details
Rule Name: (should be lower case with _ instead of spaces)
Description: (short snippet about it being a discount for customers in the new discount group)
Status: (activate it if you want it to work)
Customer Groups: (this is where you apply it to only the new group you created above)
From: and To: allow you to select a date range that it’s effective, leave blank for it to work going forward from now

Conditions: (customer type, category, and item that it applies to)
Click the green + to add a condition
Select an item such as if Category is, then you are given an underlined … to add the category that it needs to match
You can also do product attributes such as sku, or brand

Actions: (what is to happen, discount, free shipping etc…)
Apply: (To Fixed amount is an exact 10 off type discount, ask if you want to know about the others)
Discount Amount: (The physical discount, or percentage if percentage was selected above)
Enable for Subproducts: (if there is an addon, etc…)
Stop further rules: (if it’s a great discount, and you want it to supersede all other discounts, enable this feature.)

So., as you see, both methods are ways of applying discounts to some or all products based on the customer group.