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Elastly builds every price the same way: it starts from your cost and adds margin in named steps. Add the steps up, apply them to cost, and that is the price. Nothing is a black box, and a strategy is a way to add your own steps for the products you choose. Every step is a signed adjustment in percentage points, so the steps simply add up. A bigger order can pull the margin down at the same time a rising cost is nudging it up. The price reflects the total, not one factor at a time.

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The order a price is built in

1

Your base margins

The margins you set. Elastly picks the most specific one that applies.
2

What Elastly derives

Signals read from the order and your data, like a rising cost or a large order.
3

The learned adjustment

A small correction from what actually sold.
4

Your strategies

Your own rules, applied on top.
5

Your guardrails

The limits that clamp whatever the steps above produced.

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Your base margins

These are the margins you configure. Category margin is the starting markup over cost; the rest are signed adjustments on top.
The most specific setting wins. For any one margin, Elastly picks a single value using this order: an exact value, then category and brand together, then brand, then category, then segment, then country, then region, and finally your global default. Setting a margin for one category does not stack with your global default, it replaces it.

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What Elastly derives

These steps come from the order in front of it and the data it has synced. Each is off until you configure it, and each contributes only when its signal is actually present.

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A worked example

Every step is a signed adjustment on cost, and they add up to the target margin. The numbers here are illustrative.
A price built from cost $1.00: category margin +30%, segment +5%, region −6%, cost trend +1%, learned +0.5%, target margin 30.5%, price $1.30.

Each step is one signed adjustment. They add up to the target margin, then the price is rounded.

Because a price is a sum of named steps, Elastly can always tell you exactly why a number is what it is. That is the whole point of the model. See Explainability.

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What a strategy is

A strategy is a rule you add on top to shape pricing for a set of products. It has three parts: scope (which products and customers it covers), conditions (when it should act), and an action (what to do).

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Actions

Match, beat, and premium need a competitor source connected before they can act.

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Conditions

A strategy acts only when its conditions hold. You can test current margin, last margin, order quantity, payment terms, delivery speed, stock state, days of inventory, price band, whether the product is a known value item, the gap to a competitor, how many sellers are on it, demand, and elasticity. You can also test any custom attribute you have mapped.

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Scope

Scope narrows a strategy to the products and customers you mean: brand, price band, price, current margin, last margin, known value items, channel, region, country, and payment terms, plus your own mapped attributes.
A strategy can tighten, never loosen. A strategy can make four guardrails stricter for its products: the margin floor, the margin ceiling, rounding, and how far a price may move from its last one. It can never make any of them looser, and it cannot touch your other guardrails at all. See Guardrails & rules.
A strategy adds its own steps on top of the base price. It never throws the price away and starts over, so a price stays just as readable with a strategy as without one.

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It learns from real sales

When a quote is won or lost, Elastly nudges the margin for that customer and product by a small, capped amount. One order never swings a price, but thousands steer it. The steps are deliberately small: Elastly also keeps track of the highest margin a customer has accepted and the lowest they have rejected, and holds the learned offset between the two. It squeezes toward what you know rather than guessing past it.

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It learns at the most specific level it can

Learning is keyed to the narrowest scope with evidence behind it:
  1. Customer and item
  2. Customer and subcategory
  3. Segment and subcategory
  4. Segment and category
A brand new customer benefits from what the segment already learned, and a customer you sell to often gets a correction specific to them.
A loss only counts as “too expensive” if you could have supplied it. If the item was out of stock when the quote was lost, the loss had nothing to do with price, and Elastly ignores it completely rather than lowering your margin for it.
An adjustment also has to earn its place. Confidence grows with the number of observations, and a learned offset stays out of the price until there is enough evidence behind it, which is roughly four observations at the default setting.

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Guardrails always apply

Whatever the steps add up to, the price passes through your guardrails before you ever see it. The steps set the target; the guardrails decide the final number, and the recommendation tells you which one had the final say. See Guardrails & rules.