What does a Pricing Officer FTE own?
A Pricing Officer FTE on ftes.ai owns the realised price of everything a store sells, in the Merchandising department of the e-commerce org chart. It is judged on the realised discount rate and margin protected, and accountable for one outcome: a realised discount rate the owner can see, and the margin each promotion left. It exists because discounting at most stores is measured by the headline rate of each promotion, while the amount actually given, once codes, automatic discounts, stacking, staff discounts and shipping subsidy are added up, is unknown.
It does not own pricing strategy, which is the owner's, or the promotion calendar's goals. It owns the measurement and the floors, and the proposals inside them.
What is the realised discount rate, and how is it measured?
The realised discount rate is the total discount given, by every mechanism, divided by the revenue it was given on, measured per order and rolled up by product, channel, campaign and code. The Pricing Officer FTE reads every order's discount lines from the store platform, adds the shipping subsidy where the store paid for shipping it would otherwise have charged, and attributes each discount to the promotion or code that created it.
Stacking, more than one discount on the same order, is counted as a separate finding: the share of orders that stacked, the combined rate they realised against what either promotion intended, and the margin they left against the Controller FTE's fully-loaded figure and the owner's floor for the category.
How are markdowns proposed?
A markdown is proposed when a SKU's sell-through at current price, its cover and the carrying cost of holding it, from the Cash Officer FTE's arithmetic, make a lower price return more cash than holding. The proposal shows the current price, the proposed price, the floor, the margin per unit at each, the expected sell-through window, and the cash effect at the low end of its range. Markdown cadence, when to step a line down and by how much, is proposed the same way for the season, not read from a calendar.
The Pricing Officer FTE also proposes what not to discount: products whose contribution at full price is strong and whose buyers, from the Customer Intelligence FTE's cohorts, buy at full price anyway.
What are floors, and what happens when a promotion would breach one?
A price floor is the lowest price the owner will accept for a SKU or category, set in the Setup tab, usually from the Controller FTE's fully-loaded margin. It is a hard limit above the autonomy ladder: no level the Pricing Officer FTE earns lets it propose below it. When a promotion the owner scheduled, or a code combination, would take a SKU below its floor, the FTE refuses the change for that SKU and queues it for the owner with the arithmetic, rather than quietly trimming the discount to fit.
Refusal is visible on the morning page as a decision, because a floor breach is a pricing decision the owner should make knowingly or not at all.
What does the Pricing Officer FTE never do?
It never changes a price, creates or ends a promotion, or edits a code without approval at Level 0, and it never prices below a floor at any level. It never proposes a markdown from a calendar alone; every markdown carries the sell-through and carrying-cost arithmetic. It never reports margin protected as a projection; the number is measured from orders after the change.
It also never hides a stacked order. The share of orders that stacked is reported whether or not the owner wants to see it, because it is the most common way a store's margin goes missing without anyone deciding to give it away.
What does it report, and how honestly?
The Pricing Officer FTE reports the realised discount rate against the intended rate, by product, channel and campaign; stacked orders and their realised rate; codes leaking, such as a welcome code shared publicly; margin left per promotion against the floor; markdowns proposed, approved and their measured sell-through; and floors held, with every refusal listed. Margin protected is the difference, measured from orders, between the margin promotions left and the margin they would have left without the changes the owner approved.
Where the Controller FTE's cost coverage is partial for a category, the margin lines carry its confidence band, and the report says so.
How does it work with the other roles, and in which tools?
The Pricing Officer FTE takes fully-loaded margin from the Controller FTE, carrying-cost arithmetic from the Cash Officer FTE, cohorts from the Customer Intelligence FTE, and hands approved markdowns to the Retention or Lifecycle Officer FTE where they run as messages; the Conversion FTE tests pricing presentation only above the floors. It reads orders and discounts from Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce, Shopify Discounts, and the promotion calendar the owner keeps, and writes approved changes back to the store.
It is usually hired once the Controller FTE has raised cost coverage enough for floors to be set honestly.