Magento 2 Advanced Pricing Import: Special Prices, Group Prices, Tier Prices & MAP

Today, we are going to talk about the Magento 2 advanced pricing import. In this guide, we explain for types of advanced pricing in Magento 2: Special Price, Group Price, Tier Price, and MAP. You will find out how to get a sample Magento 2 advanced pricing CSV. Next, we describe attributes associated with advanced pricing in Magento 2. After that, you will learn how to import advanced pricing to Magento 2. We will explore two different use cases. Firstly, we will teach you how to import tier prices to Magento 2 as a separate entity via the default Magento 2 import. Next, you will master the Magento 2 advanced pricing import as a part of a product import procedure based on the Improved Import & Export extension.

Unfortunately, the default Magento 2 import tools only let you import products and advanced prices separately. It means that you need to upload one file with product data except for four types of advanced pricing provided via different spreadsheets. You must admit that it is not very convenient, especially when you move the entire catalog. To address this issue, we describe another procedure, involving the Improved Import and Export extension. With this tool, you can import both products and their advanced prices in a single file.

Magento 2 Advanced Pricing Explained

Advanced pricing of Magento 2 is a set of handy features that offer customers better prices. The idea behind Magento’s advanced pricing is to encourage buyers to spend more, drive traffic, and clear old stock. Based on a period, quantity, or customer group, Magento 2 comes with the following four types of advanced pricing:

• Special Price. Provides customers with a lower price than the regular one. You can set it up for a specific period.
• Group Price: Offers discounted prices for a particular customer group.
• Tier Price: Offers customers better prices when they buy products in bulk. The more they purchase, the better the discount is. It’s a feature that let’s you implement different MOQs.
• MAP. This advanced pricing type stands for the Minimum Advertised Price. It’s helpful when you cannot display a product at a lower price than a manufacturer offers. To maintain MAP compliance while providing customers with a better price, Magento hides the discounted price from a product detail page but it can be revealed according to specified parameters.

So, these are four types of advanced pricing in Magento 2. And you can transfer each one to your website in bulk. But before going any further, let’s see where to get a Magento 2 advanced pricing import CSV. You can find more information on the platform in our Magento 2 import/export guide list.

Magento 2 Advanced Pricing Import Table

Every import procedure requires preparations, and advanced pricing is not an exception. You need to get a properly formatted CSV table before importing advanced pricing to Magento 2. You can get the import table with properly set up separators and sample data in the following ways:

• Your Magento 2 Backend. Log in, navigate to System > Import > select Advanced Pricing > Download sample file.
• Our GitHub. Navigate to FireBear Studio GitHub and download a sample import table there.
• Our Google Sheets. Navigate to Master Google Table and save it to your Google Drive.

We recommend you use Google Sheets. This sample table comes with a description of Magento 2 Advanced Pricing attributes and clues on which values are required in every column. Read more about Google Sheet Master Table.

If you for some reason want to create an import table from scratch – stick to the following formatting settings:

Remember, you can use your own import table formatting and map the field separator and text delimiter later during the import process. Meaning that if you are working with the custom table provided by your supplier you can still get it to work. 

Magento 2 Advanced Pricing Attributes

In most cases, advanced pricing in Magento 2 is associated with tier prices. Since tier prices are applied per product, you need to specify the product SKU for reference and then advanced pricing attributes.

Additional advanced pricing attributes are mentioned below. We explain them in the context of the enhanced product import process.

As for the default Magento 2 advanced pricing import procedure, it uses SKU to identify the product and then advanced price attributes to apply discounts. Let’s see how it looks in practice. 

Default Magento 2 Advanced Pricing Import

There are two ways of importing advanced pricing to Magento 2:

• First, you can use the native Magento 2 import procedure;
• Second, you can use the Improved Import and Export extension by FireBear company.

In this chapter, we will focus on the native Magento 2 import and the way it lets you import tier prices. We will be using the import table composed by the FireBear team in the Master Google Sheet.

NOTE:

If you want to use the same sample table, make sure you have imported or created products with the same SKUs. Otherwise, the import will fail as it only allows adding tier prices to existing products.

Another important notice is that every tier of your tier price should be imported in a dedicated row. You cannot import two tier price conditions for a single product in a single row.

In the screenshot, you can see that in rows 2 and 3, we import two tier prices for the same product with SKU:TST-Conf-Simp-S-Gray. In rows 4 and 5, tier prices are available for the product with SKU:TST-Conf-Simp-S-Green. Take it into account, if you want to import multiple tiers for a single Magento 2 product.

Now to the import itself. You can use the default Magento 2 instruments to import tier prices as a separate entity – Advanced Pricing. Follow these steps to run the Magento 2 advanced pricing import: 

1. Log in to your Magento 2 admin panel and navigate to System > Import.
   
2. In the Entity Type field, select Advanced Pricing and scroll a bit down to the Import Behavior settings.
   
3. Select Import Behavior. Choose whether you want to add, replace, or delete tier prices from the import table.
4. Next, if you are using different table formatting from the one supported by Magento 2, you need to set up Field and Multiple value separators.
   You can skip the Fields enclosure checkbox as it is only used for product attribute ‘additional_attributes’.
5. When done with the import behavior, scroll to the last configuration section called File to Import. Click the Choose File button and locate the import table you have prepared. You can ignore the Images File Directory field, as you won’t be importing product images
   
6. Once done, click the Check Data button in the upper right corner. You should get a message that looks something like this:
   If you have any errors in the CSV, Magento 2 will let you know which rows or columns are problematic.
7. If everything is correct and the file is valid, click the Import button to import advanced pricing to Magento 2.
8. After the import process is finished Magento 2 will display a success message:

That’s it! You have just performed the Magento 2 tier price import. However, it is not the most convenient way to update advanced pricing in Magento 2. Let’s look at the enhanced procedure. 

How to Import Advanced Pricing to Magento 2 With Products

We’ve already mentioned that you can use Improved Import & Export to simplify the Magento 2 advanced pricing import. So, what exactly does the extension do? It lets you import all four types of advanced pricing to Magento 2 as a part of a product update. Yes, you got it right: instead of importing a separate file with products and then another one with advanced prices, you can combine them. Add special prices, group prices, tier prices, and MAP to a product CSV and run the import process.  

Prepare Your Import Table

You can all all advanced pricing attributes to a product CSV file. However, we will describe each advanced pricing type separately, to illustrate their nuances.

Magento 2 Tier Price Product Import Table

To import tier prices to Magento 2 along with products, you need a new import table. Compose it from standard product attributes with the tier_prices attribute. You can get a sample Product+Advanced Pricing import table at the Master Google Sheet. In the table, you will find a set of simple products with tier prices and descriptions per attribute.

In the screenshot above, you can see that the tier_prices attribute has the following structure:

Customer Group,Product qty,Discounted price,Discount percent,Website|Another tier

Where:

• Customer Group – is the name of the customer group where the tier price will be applied. Mind the letter case when typing customer group name.
• Product qty – product quantity the customer has to add to the cart to be subject to the tier price.
• Discounted price – the fixed price of the product that will be applied once the customer adds to the cart the required quantity of the product.
• Discount percent – a discount that will be applied to the product price once the customer adds to the cart the required quantity of the product.
• Website – the code of the website the tier price is applied to. You can find the code of the website at Stores > All Stores > Click the required website in the grid > Copy the value in the ‘code’ field. Use ‘All’ to apply to All Websites.

Use commas to separate tier price attributes and pipe to separate multiple tiers.

NOTE:

You can only use either a discounted price or a discount percentage.

• If you want to use a specific Discounted price value – set the Discount percent value to ‘0’;
• If you want to use a specific Discount percent value – set the Discounted price value to ‘0.

For example, we have a product we want to import tier prices for. These are the advanced pricing conditions to be applied:

Then, according to these conditions, the value for the tier_price attribute of this product should look as follows:

General,400,80,0,All|NOT LOGGED IN,500,0,15,All

Note that the first tire is the ‘Fixed’ value and the second one is the ‘Discount’ value. Composing such values is pretty simple if you have a visual reference before you. Try composing tier price values yourself and remember to use this Google Sheet as a live example.

Magento 2 Group Price Product Import Table

In the case of group prices, the Magento 2 advanced pricing import is similar to the import of tiers – you use the same tier_prices attribute. However, you need to specify a customer group and “1” as the number of products that should be added to the cart to apply the discount. For instance, Wholesale,1,99,0,All, where

• Wholesale is the name of the customer group to display the group price;
• 1 is the Product qty that should be added to the cart to enable the discount;
• 99 is the discounted fixed price of the product displayed to the specified customer group;
• 0 is a discount that will be applied to the product price displayed to the specified customer group;
• All is the code of the website the group price is applied to.

Magento 2 Special Price Product Import Table

When it comes to the Magento 2 advance pricing import of special prices, you need to add the following three attributes to your product CSV file:

• special_price – a product’s special price – 25;
• special_from_date – a starting period for a product’s special price – 2024-02-27;
• special_to_date – the end of a product’s special price – 2024-12-27.

Magento 2 MAP Product Import Table

As for the Minimum Advertised Price, importing advanced pricing to Magento 2 requires these attributes and values: 

1. msrp – a product’s minimum advertised price – 50;
2. msrp_display_actual_price_type – the way you display the actual price. The following values are supported:
   • Use config – it applies the general MAP setting for this option;
   • On Gesture – a customer has to press Click for price to see the actual price of the product in the popup;
   • In Cart – a customer has to add a product to the shopping cart to see the actual price;
   • Before Order Confirmation – the actual price is displayed to a customer at the end of the checkout process.

Import Advanced Pricing to Magento 2 In Product CSV

Follow these steps to import the advanced pricing data to Magento 2 in a product CSV:

1. Log in to your Magento 2 admin panel and navigate to System > Improved Import / Export > Import Jobs. You will see the import jobs grid where you will edit and manage your import jobs. Click the ‘Add New Job’ button to proceed. 
2. The new job screen will welcome you with the General settings:
   Here you will need to name the import job to identify it later. Set the job frequency using the cron scheduler. You can read more about how to set up cron in the extension manual.
3. After the General settings, you are suggested to select an entity you will be importing. Note how we are importing Products – not Advanced Pricing.
   
4. In the Import Behavior section, choose your import behavior and validation strategy.
   
5. In the Import Source section, upload your product CSV that contains the advanced pricing data.
   You can upload the import table from a local folder, direct URL, FTP/SFTP, or Dropbox, or paste the link to a Google Sheets spreadsheet.
6. Click the ‘Validate’ button once the path to the import table is specified.
7. When importing products you can also set up category and attribute mapping, and decide how configurable products should be imported and created. However, in this guide, we will only cover general import job settings. For the full list of instructions read the Improved Import and Export manual.
8. Now, you only need to run the job to import advanced pricing to Magento 2. Hit the ‘Save & Run’ button in the upper right corner. And then the ‘Run’ button at the popover. The extension will execute the import procedure and provide you with the job log.
   
9.  In the job log, you can get an idea of how the import process went. The log can later be accessed from the Edit Job screen or at the var/log/firebear folder at your store FTP.

That’s how the Magento 2 advanced pricing import works. Now, you know how to run the update with the help of the default tools or Improved Import & Export. In addition to a product import combined with advanced pricing data, the extension also offers lots of other benefits. 

First and foremost, it allows you to schedule the import jobs to run automatically. Second, it supports more import sources including Google Sheets, meaning that you can work together with your colleagues or supplier on a single sheet, then paste it and schedule automatic updates. Other notable features include:

• Import of numerous entities, including categories, CMS pages, Cart Price rules, etc.
• Support for Google Sheets, direct URL, and FTP/SFTP as import sources;
• Support for CSV, Excel, JSON, ODS, and XML files;
• Price adjustments for imported products;
• Configurable product import: create new configurable products during import;
• Import and export of orders, invoices, and shipping data.

You can find more information about our import extension here: Improved Import Magento 2 Extension.

Magento 2 Advanced Pricing Import FAQ

Below, we provide answers to questions that Magento 2 users often ask when it comes to the benefits of advanced pricing import with the Improved Import & Export Magento 2 extension.

Final Words

As you can see, there are two ways of the Magento 2 advanced pricing import. You can either use the platform’s built-in functionality and transfer the advanced pricing data as a separate entity or go with a more user-friendly approach and add any type of advanced pricing to your product update.