Price Components

MATRIXX price components are reusable pricing items that can be included in any number of product offers. They include charges, discounts, grants, refunds, and forfeitures.

A charge adds an amount to a balance, a discount reduces the amount of a charge, a grant adds an amount to a balance, a refund specifies the return amount on a one-time purchase charge upon cancelation, and a forfeiture defines the amount of the purchase grant forfeited on a one time offer purchase upon cancelation. Price components are revisioned items so you can set a start date and time on them. Rate tables are part of price components.

You can base a price component on a field in the network message, the subscription MATRIXX Data Container (MDC), or group MDC, or a combination of the three. In addition, for charges and discounts based on usage, the device MDC can also be used to determine the charge or discount amount if the device is used during usage. For example, you can set up charges based on the length of a session, a subscriber's phone brand, and the subscriber's loyalty status.

You set up the amount charged, discounted, or granted by adding one or more decision tables to the price component and then assigning rating formulas to each parameter set configured in the decision table. The rating formula specifies the rules that determine the amount to apply to a specified balance.

Because decision tables are reusable and can be used by any number of price components, first determine what type of pricing you must create and determine if the same decision table can be reused in multiple pricing scenarios. For example, if your pricing contains several flat-rate charges and flat-rate discounts (the price does not change based on a normalization parameter), it is easier to create one simple decision table with one row that can be used by all such price components. When you create each flat-rate charge or discount, you can select the simple decision table when creating the rate table and define the rating formula for that charge or discount.

You can define parameters that you can add to pricing components. You can use parameters assigned to price components in rate table formulas instead of using fixed values. You can use parameter values to set the scale coefficient, constant, and unit factor. You can set parameter values within a catalog definition or at purchase time. For information about defining parameters, see the discussion about parameters.

When you assign a price component that has parameters to an offer, or a bundle, MATRIXX creates a default binding between each price component parameter and a parameter with the same name in the offer or bundle. Any parameters that are not already assigned to the offer or bundle, are added to the list of offer or bundle parameters without you having to add them manually. Similarly, when you assign a parameter to a rate table in the price component, the parameter is automatically assigned to the parent price component.