Read-Only Price Books in B2C Commerce

Read-only price books are XML-based price books that import at least 60% faster than standard editable price books and can hold up to 300 million prices. Read-only price books are helpful for merchants who manage prices in a third-party PIM and import frequently. The tradeoff for increased import speed is that you can't edit individual prices through the standard Business Manager process.

Note To use read-only price books, an admin must enable the High Scale Price Books feature switch.

A read-only price book is an XML-based price book that imports a minimum of 60% quicker than a standard editable price book. Read-only price books don’t require product indexing for prices to take effect in the search index. Read-only price books can hold up to 300 million prices and are especially helpful for customers with large amounts of prices that need frequent updating. We recommend removing old price books and price entries to remain within the quota for optimal storefront performance.

Note To import your current price books as read-only price books, enable the Import All Prices Books as Read Only preference by clicking App Launcher , and then going to Administration > Global Preference > Import and Export. Then reimport your price books.

Because of the underlying storage technology used in read-only price books, you can't update individual prices or price tables using the standard Business Manager process. To update prices, edit them in your PIM and reimport the price book. If you need to change a price immediately, use the Business Manager workaround.

Consider using read-only price books if you’re a third-party PIM for price management and frequently import product prices to Business Manager. We don't recommend this feature for merchants who maintain a few price books directly in Business Manager.

When importing a read-only price book, we recommend importing the price book to your staging instance. Then replicate the price book to your production instance.

Note To let child price books override their parent price books, enable the pricing preference Enable Price Books Override by clicking App Launcher , and then going to Administration > Global Preference > Pricing Preferences. This feature doesn't work if you have a mix of editable and read-only price books. If you have a mix of price book types, the editable price book always overwrites the read-only price.

• Delete Redundant Prices from Read-Only Price Books in B2C Commerce
  After you switch to read-only price books, delete the matching prices left in the old storage system to speed up price book replication. The read-only price books already store those prices in the new system.
• Update a Price in a Read-Only Price Book in B2C Commerce
  The supported way to change a price in a read-only price book is to edit it in your PIM source and reimport. In an emergency, use this Business Manager workaround: create an editable price book holding the new price, which takes precedence until you reimport from the PIM and delete the override.