Price List
Definition
A price list is a small document with unusual demands on it. The content is simple — item, unit, price, and the qualifiers that apply: currency, tax treatment, minimum order, validity dates. The difficulty is that it changes more often than anything else a business publishes, and every stale copy in circulation is a potential argument at the till or in accounts payable. Trade suppliers version their lists explicitly, with an effective-from date at the top. Consumer businesses usually keep prices on the web page itself. Either way, the property that matters is a single address that always shows the current list.
Why It Matters
Wrong prices cost money in both directions. Quote low and you either honour it or lose the customer; quote high and the order goes elsewhere. The stale-copy problem is the common one: a file emailed in March is still being quoted from in November, because the person quoting has no way of knowing a newer one exists. Publishing at a stable address turns that round, so the link somebody saved in March opens the November list. The effective date is what makes it checkable, which is why a price list without one invites exactly the argument it was meant to prevent.
How It Works
Keep the list as a page or a small file at one address and republish in place when prices move. Put the effective date in the visible content, not only in the file name. Version history earns its keep here: when a customer says they were quoted something different, you want to look up what the list said on the day, and a host that keeps previous versions gives you that without a filing system. Set a short Cache-Control max-age — minutes rather than a day — so a change reaches people quickly instead of sitting behind a cached copy. If procurement systems need a machine-readable version, publish a CSV file beside the human-readable one.
Real-World Example
A timber merchant publishes prices at yardname-prices.99helpers.site with the effective date on the first line. In April the sheet materials go up; the merchant uploads a new file to the same address, and the link in every quote email, on the counter poster and in a customer's own ordering notes shows the new figures. When a builder queries a quote from March, the previous version is still there in the history, dated, and the conversation is over in a minute.
Common Mistakes
- ✕Emailing the price list as an attachment — every recipient now holds a copy that will never update, and one of them will quote from it next year
- ✕Leaving the effective date off — with no date on the document, nobody can tell whether the copy in front of them is current, including your own staff
- ✕Setting a long cache lifetime on a file that changes weekly — visitors keep seeing yesterday's prices from their browser cache and nobody can work out why
Related Terms
Product Catalogue
A product catalogue is the organised list of everything you sell, with the detail a buyer needs in order to choose: description, specification, code, image and often price. It can be a printed book, a document or a set of web pages.
Digital Menu
A digital menu is a restaurant, cafe or bar menu published as a web page and usually reached by scanning a code on the table. It replaces reprinting every time something changes.
File Versioning
File versioning keeps the previous copy of a file when a new one is uploaded under the same name, instead of overwriting it. Every publish adds to a history you can read back from, rather than replacing what was there.
Cache-Control
The HTTP response header that tells browsers and caches whether they may keep a copy of a file, for how long, and who is allowed to. It is the single biggest lever over how fast a site feels on a second visit.
Instant Rollback
Instant rollback is returning a published file or site to an earlier version in a single action, with the change live straight away. Nothing is rebuilt and nothing is re-uploaded, because the earlier copy is already stored.
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