Stop Revenue Leakage: Contract Pricing Precision in B2B Commerce - The ACCELQ Strategy

nithiyapalanisamy
Dec 22, 2025
3 min read

Pricing errors in B2B Commerce always have a critical impact as they could lead to significant revenue loss or even result in legal issues. This is because the contracts are negotiated individually unlike B2C

CONTRACT PRICE VALIDATION: The Source of Truth Testing

In B2C e-commerce, a T-Shirt usually costs the same for everyone. However, in B2B, the price depends on WHO is looking at it and WHAT he/she is looking at! Yes, in certain business cases, product contract definition is also a factor to be considered on top of Customer Contracts

Customer A (Gold Contract): Gets 20% off list price.
Customer B (Silver Contract): Gets a fixed negotiated rate
Customer C (Standard Contract - Ex: New User): Pays full list price

Testing this manually is a nightmare of spreadsheets and calculator work. If you only check that a price appears, you are NOT testing the business logic

ACCELQ, the AI-Powered Test Automation Tool offers Data-Driven Testing & Database/API Integration to validate the contract-specific pricing with precision

THE CHALLENGE - BLACKBOX PRICE

On the UI, you see $1,250.00. But how does your automation script know if that is correct ?

Hard-coding is brittle: You can't write Verify text is $1,250.00 because if the base price changes in ERP, your test will fail
Logic is hidden: The calculation happens in the backend (Pricing Engine), so the UI just displays the final result

THE STRATEGY - Trust, but VERIFY

There are two ACCELQ tactics that will help with this validation

The Formula Method: Injecting the pricing contract logic into the script (best for percentage-based tiers).
The DB Lookup Method: Fetching the expected price directly from the database (however, the former is a better strategy as this will involve DB hits everytime the script is run)

The Formula Method: Data-Driven Logic

This method is perfect when pricing is rule-based. Ex: Gold Tier gets 15% off

Step 1: Setup Your Data Profile

Create a Data Sheet(Ex: Test_Customers) with Login Credentials & Expected Discount%

Step 2: Capture Base Price (The Reference)

Get the Base Price as a Guest User

Action: Get Text of the Base Price WebElement and store it in a local parameter - Say, Base_Price
Logic: Inject the discount calculation in the script and get the final price

Note: Cleaning the string (Base_Price) will help with clean comparison of numbers avoiding flaky issues with special characters (like $ & ,) for verification in String format. Optimized solution is to use Numeric verification

Step 3: Apply the Logic

In your Action logic, Perform the calculation inside the Script using ACCELQ Expression Builder

Important: Use Numeric Expression Builder (with decimal placeholders), so that the script will extract the numeric portions to perform the calculations

Get the Discount_Multiplier from the Test_Customers Data row and assign it to a local parameter Multiplier
Calculate Expected Price: <Expected_Price> = <Base_Price> * <Var_Multiplier>

Step 4: Verify Against UI

Action: Get Text from the Final_Price element on the page
Validation: Verify Text matches <Expected_Price>

The DB Lookup Method - Database Integration

This is the most robust method for B2B. It connects directly to your pricing engine's database to see what the price should be, bypassing any UI rendering issues

Step 1: Configure Database Resource

Set up a Database Profile as a Global Property to Connect to the DB Server (Oracle, SQL Server, etc.)

Step 2: Connect to DB Server & Execute the DB Query

Connect to <Database> Server
Instead of calculating the price, we can fetch it from the database directly using Execute Database Query command. Sample Query:
Output: Store the result in a local parameter <DB_Price>

Step 3: Compare UI vs. DB

Now you have the Source of Truth (DB) and the Displayed Value (UI)

Action: Get Text of the Final Price on the Web Page, say UI_Price
Logic: Verify if numbers match - <UI_Price> equals <DB_Price>

PRO-TIPS for Pricing Scripts

1. Handling DIRTY TEXT: B2B sites often display prices like USD 1,200.00 or $1.200,00 (EU format).

ACCELQ Command: Replace Text
Usage: Replace $ with [blank] and , with [blank] before doing any math or DB comparison. Always convert string to number type for calculations.

2. The Penny Difference (Floating Point Math): Computers are notoriously bad at decimal math (e.g., 10.2 * 3 might result in 30.600000001).

Fix: Never check if Price A == Price B.
Better Logic: If the difference is less than 0.01, Then Pass Else Fail

3. Bulk Verification: If you have a table of 50 SKUs,

Don't check one by one manually
Use a Loop Statement in your ACCELQ Script to iterate through the web table rows. Inside the loop, read the SKU, query the DB for that SKU's price and verify the cell in the current row