BIC Workshop: Communicating Price Details in ONIX

BIC Workshop: Communicating Price Details in ONIX

Prices are one of the key data types in ONIX – and as a commercial standard that aims to enable automation of e-commerce, getting prices right and ensuring they are interpreted correctly by recipients is critical. And yet as books are increasingly sold into more complex markets, or with more complex pricing models, publishers and distributors are not always clear on what can be transmitted, what are the best practices, or how their existing price information is interpreted.

This BIC workshop will discuss best practice for communicating pricing details in ONIX records. It will outline the rationale for getting your metadata right, the specification to follow and how to carry out the work correctly. The workshop will also include an open discussion about the issues, errors and/or omissions experienced by the delegates, examples of which should be brought to the workshop (see Delegate Preparation Work, below). The workshop will consider both simple, ‘traditional’ print pricing and more complex eBook models and advanced use cases, e.g. price conditions and price constraints, tax details, discounts etc. using the latest new features of ONIX 3.0.3. Depending on the delegates in attendance, the workshop may also discuss what application developers can do to support the best practice.

This workshop will be of interest and relevance to users of both ONIX 2.1 and ONIX 3.0, and to publishers and retailers, data intermediaries and system vendors.

Please note that this workshop is a re-run of the BIC Workshop (of the same name) that took place in 2017. For this reason, attendees of the previous workshop should not attend as the content of the workshop will be precisely the same as the former session.

Delegate Preparation Work
Delegates of this workshop will need to bring the following with them (preferably on a USB stick):

• Example records of their organisation’s data, ideally in a small ONIX file, showing pricing details; multiple examples with different price types from each organisation are welcome. Examples may be anonymised by changing titles, authors, ISBNs, dates, textual descriptions etc. if necessary, but should ideally not be artificially-constructed sample records.
• Matching screenshots showing the same data in their management systems.

By registering to attend this event, you are accepting that your organisation’s metadata will be seen and reviewed by others. Delegates should also ensure they are aware of the requirements of competition law, and should not discuss any details of actual prices or pricing strategies – the workshop discussion must be limited to how prices are communicated. You will be asked to tick a box to confirm your understanding of this during the registration process.