Multi-Product Quantity Discount

Multi-product quantity discount (MPQD) is the quantity discount for purchasing items from multiple products. To launch MPQD for products with different MPQD strategies, sellers always need to manually unify the MPQD strategies of the products in current practice. The inefficient manual approach often cannot reasonably achieve the purpose, which greatly limits the development of MPQD business. Can we develop a general algorithm to take over the manual work to reasonably calculate the discounts for purchased products while keeping the products’ MPQD strategies unchanged? This is the goal proposed and achieved in this paper for the first time. Starting from revealing the underlying logic of MPQD, this paper constructs a theoretical framework including the basic assumptions, concepts, and principles, and based on the theoretical framework completes the development of an MPQD algorithm (MPQDA for short). With the support of the MPQDA which breaks down the barriers to launching MPQD, sellers will be able to launch large-scale automated and complex MPQD businesses, and the manifestations of MPQD will be greatly enriched. In addition, as a convenient tool for automating and accurately coordinating the benefits of multiple parties, the MPQDA can be widely and persistently applied in the areas where the relevant business can be mapped to MPQD, such as in fission marketing, which will give rise to new business models.