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Price Selection Strategy

In this document, you’ll learn what a price selection strategy is.

If you’re interested to learn how to override the price selection strategy, check out this documentation instead.

What's a Price Selection Strategy​

Medusa provides many features and different ways to control the price of a product variant. This includes price lists and their different conditions, products’ original prices, and taxes.

Medusa uses the PriceSelectionStrategy class to retrieve the best price for a product variant for a specific context. This strategy is used whenever products and line items are retrieved or manipulated on the storefront.

PriceSelectionStrategy Overview​

The PriceSelectionStrategy class extends the AbstractPriceSelectionStrategy class. Its main method is the calculateVariantPrice which is used to retrieve a product variant’s price in a given context.

calculateVariantPrice Method​

Medusa uses this method to retrieve a product variant’s price when a product variant or line item is retrieved or manipulated. This includes when other entities that product variants and line items belong to are retrieved, such as products and carts respectively.

This method accepts two parameters:

  1. The ID of the variant.
  2. A context object.

The method retrieves all the available prices of the variant based on the conditions in the context object.

It returns an object with the following properties:

  1. originalPrice: The original price of the variant which depends on the selected region or currency code in the context object. If both region ID and currency code are available in the context object, the region has higher precedence.
  2. originalPriceIncludesTax: A boolean value indicating whether the original price includes taxes or not. This is only available for Tax-Inclusive Pricing.
  3. calculatedPrice: The lowest price among the prices of the product variant retrieved using the context object.
  4. calculatedPriceIncludesTax: A boolean value indicating whether the calculated price includes taxes or not. This is only available for Tax-Inclusive Pricing.
  5. calculatedPriceType: Either default if the calculatedPrice is the original price, or the type of the price list applied.
  6. prices: an array of all the prices of the variant retrieved using the context object. It can include its original price and its price lists if there are any.

You can learn more about price lists and how they’re used in this documentation.

Context Object​

The context that is passed to the calculateVariantPrice method is an object that has the following optional properties:

  • cart_id: The ID of the customer’s cart. This is used when the prices are being retrieved for the variant of a line item, as it is used to determine the current region and currency code of the context.
  • customer_id: The ID of the customer. This is used to filter out price lists for a customer group that this customer doesn’t belong to.
  • quantity: The quantity of the item in the cart. This is used to filter out price lists that have min_quantity or max_quantity conditions set.
  • region_id: The ID of the region the customer is using.
  • currency_code: The currency code the customer is using.
  • include_discount_prices: A boolean value indicating whether price list prices should be retrieved or not.
  • tax_rates: The tax rates to be applied. This is only used for Tax-Inclusive Pricing.

See Also​