Setting Price Types and Sales Rights in Metadata

You have probably experienced a frustrating occurrence where CoreSource has successfully distributed titles to your desired vendors, but the books do not become available at retailer websites even after the allotted business days required to process the data. You are not alone; pricing metadata (or supply detail) is one of the most commonly misinterpreted areas that prevent a title from being processed after it reaches vendors. In this tutorial, you’ll learn what you can do to avoid those pesky pricing metadata issues.

Price Types and Price Effective Dates

• Retail and library price types require a price type description of “01 RRP excluding tax” (typically used in territories where prices are displayed exclusive of tax, like Canada and the US) or “02 RRP including tax” (typically used in territories where consumers are accustomed to seeing tax included in prices, such as the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand)
• Agency prices require either “41 Publishers retail price excluding tax” (for tax-exclusive territories)or “42 Publishers retail price including tax” (for tax-inclusive territories)
• Agency prices cannot be converted from other currencies; if you would like your title to be available on iTunes in countries other than the US and Canada, please set alternate currency prices (GBP and EUR covers most countries included in eBOUND’s Apple distribution agreement)
• A “Price Effective From” date is always required, but cannot be a future date

Sales Rights

• Either “Countries Included” or “Regions Included” must include a value
• For CoreSource template users, Price 1 is your primary price, and you will only set a different price (i.e. Price 2) if you would like a different price to be used, for instance, during promotional periods
• Discounts are only used if you have signed an agreement where you have agreed to discount the retail price for vendors (i.e. for CoreSource Fulfilment or EBSCO)

Best Practice for Sales Rights

When inputting metadata that includes an option to input a negative value, such as “Regions Excluded” or “Countries Excluded,” it is best to leave those blank, unless you specifically do not have rights to sell a title in a country or territory that also uses the currency you are providing. For example, your firm has set a price for a title in Canadian dollars, but because of some sales rights issues, you cannot sell the digital title in Alberta. This would be one of the only instances where a value will be listed under “Regions Excluded” (in this example it would be “CA-AB”).

However, if you have world rights for a title, and would like to have a CAD specific price for Canadian distribution, but a USD price for everywhere else, “Countries Included” will be populated with CA for the CAD price, and “Regions Included” will be populated with “WORLD” for the USD price. No other codes are required or necessary for the “Excluded” fields.

Previously, we have recommended that clients input “ROW” (standing for rest of world) in “Regions Excluded” for country specific prices, but some vendors such as Google do not recognize this region code, and will not accept metadata including it. As long as the local currency has been included in your metadata, the respective country or region will prioritize using the appropriate price, instead of converting from another currency, like USD.

CoreSource Template

The relevant columns in the CoreSource metadata template to follow the above best practice guidelines are under the heading “Supply Territories for Price 1” (the same columns for subsequent prices other than 1 must also be filled if you are setting multiple prices).

For a price that is in a country’s local currency and intended for other countries (such as EUR), please list them in Price 1-Countries Included, and leave all the other columns for the price blank.

If you are setting a price to convert worldwide (such as USD), please list “WORLD” in Price 1-Regions Included.

If you are setting a price to convert worldwide, but also would like to set local currency prices for marketing purposes, list the worldwide price (such as USD) with “WORLD” under Price 1-Regions Included, but list the relevant countries in Price 1-Countries Included for each respective currency. Do not list any exclusions in either Price1-Countries Excluded or Price 1-Regions Excluded.

For an easily accessible list of currency, country, and region codes, navigate to the Code Lists worksheet in the CoreSource metadata template.

When to use “excluded” columns

1. If you do not have rights to sell a title in a certain country, or certain states or provinces within a country
2. If you must include a certain currency for your metadata to be accepted (such as Follett and OverDrive requiring USD prices), but you do not have rights to sell in the related country
   
3. If the price uses a currency that is adopted in countries you do not have rights to sell in, such as listing a price in EUR, but not having rights to sell in Italy

Need a more fulsome example to follow? Please click here to download a dummy template following best practices for one title group in EPUB, MOBI, and web PDF formats with worldwide rights. If you have further questions about inputting pricing metadata via the CoreSource template, please contact our Digital Services Coordinator.

ONIX Metadata

To apply the best practice guidelines to ONIX, please follow the four examples below.

To include a worldwide price using USD:

<price>
<j148>01</j148>
<j151>19.95</j151>
<j152>USD</j152>
<j303>WORLD</j303>
</price>

To include a currency specific price for just one country:

<price>
<j148>01</j148>
<j151>19.95</j151>
<j152>CAD</j152>
<b251>CA</b251>
</price>

To set a price with a necessary exclusion, say not being able to sell your title in Quebec though you have rights for the rest of Canada:

<price>
<j148>01</j148>
<j151>19.95</j151>
<j152>CAD</j152>
<b251>CA</b251>
<j303>CA-QC</j303>
</price>

If including a price with currency that is accepted in several countries, but you do not have sales rights in one or more:

<price>
<j148>02</j148>
<j151>19.95</j151>
<j152>EUR</j152>
<b251>ES DE</b251>
<j304>FR</j303>
</price>


Please abstain from using ROW wherever possible as it limits where your metadata can be processed successfully.

For further questions on how to include proper pricing metadata with ONIX, please contact our Manager of Technology.