Precious Metals Pricing Overview

Scottsdale Mint sells physical precious metals (coins and bars) whose prices are derived from live spot market prices. This page describes the end-to-end pricing data flow from the NFusion pricing source through to the WooCommerce product catalog.

---

Pricing Data Flow

NFusion Solutions API (spot prices, premium data)
         │
         ▼
Laravel Pricing Middleware (external — not in this repo)
    - Fetches spot prices from NFusion
    - Applies site-specific premium rules
    - Calculates final prices per SKU
    - Authenticates to WordPress REST API
         │
         │  POST every minute
         ▼
POST /wp-json/suma/v1/product/update-prices
    (suma-elementor theme, inc/endpoints/class-pricing.php)
         │
         ▼
\Suma\Product\PriceUpdater::update_batch()
    - Looks up WC product by SKU
    - Writes new price to _price and _regular_price post meta
    - Flushes Redis object cache for those product IDs
         │
         ▼
CloudFront cache invalidation
    - Product page HTML cache invalidated for updated products
         │
         ▼
Customer sees up-to-date prices on product pages

---

Price Components

Every precious metals product price is composed of:

Component	Description	Stored In
Spot Price	Live market price for the metal (USD per troy oz)	Redis transient (suma_pricing_cache)
Metal Weight	Troy ounce content of the specific product	_metal_weight_troy_oz product meta
Purity	Metal fineness fraction	_metal_purity product meta
Premium	Markup over spot (% or fixed $)	_premium_type, _premium_value product meta
Volume Discount	Reduction for larger quantities	_volume_pricing product meta (JSON)
Customer Tier	Dealer/wholesale discount for certain user roles	User role + ACF user meta

Formula

Metal Value = Spot Price × Metal Weight (oz) × Purity
Final Price = Metal Value + Premium
              (less volume discount if applicable)

---

Supported Metals

Metal	Typical Units Sold	Purity Examples
Gold	Troy ounce, fractional oz, gram	.999, .9999, .9167 (22K)
Silver	Troy ounce, 5 oz, 10 oz, kilo	.999, .9999
Platinum	Troy ounce	.9995
Palladium	Troy ounce	.9995

---

Price Update Frequency

• Frequency: Every 1 minute (driven by the Laravel pricing middleware)
• Trigger: External cron on the Laravel side calls the WP REST API
• Volume: Typically 100–500 products updated per batch
• Timeout: Lambda timeout is 120 seconds; price updates should complete in < 10 seconds

---

Live Spot Price Display

In addition to WooCommerce product prices being updated every minute, the site also displays a live spot price chart widget (from NFusion) that updates even more frequently:

• Widget source: nfusion/live-price-chart/
• Renders an embeddable JavaScript widget from NFusion's CDN
• Not cached by WordPress — fetches directly from NFusion CDN
• Configurable via Elementor widget or shortcode

---

Sale Pricing

Products can be put on sale in two ways:

1. Manual sale: Admin sets a sale_price in the WooCommerce product editor
2. Scheduled sale: Admin sets date_on_sale_from and date_on_sale_to
3. Automatic via REST API: POST /wp-json/suma/v1/product/start-sales and end-expired-sales endpoints manage scheduled sales

The Product\PriceUpdater class validates that a sale price is never negative after spot price changes:

// class-woocommerce.php
add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_is_on_sale', [ $this, 'validate_sale_price' ], 10, 2 );

---

Pricing for Dealers / Wholesale

Customer accounts with dealer-tier roles receive different premium rates. The Product\Pricing class checks the current user's role and tier via \Suma\Theme\User before calculating the final price.

This is transparent to the customer — they see their tier-specific pricing automatically when logged in.

---

Historical Pricing Data

The \Suma\Trends class and the /wp-json/suma/v1/trends REST endpoint provide historical spot price data for:

• Front-end price charts
• NFusion live chart widget data
• Admin analytics reports

Data is cached in Redis with time-based expiration appropriate to the requested period (1 day, 1 week, 1 month, etc.).