Overview
PeakCommerce applies business logic through several separate, purpose-built engines rather than one general-purpose rule system. There is no single "if this, then that" builder that can express any rule you can imagine. Each engine owns one job, has its own configuration surface, and runs at a specific point in a flow.
Knowing which engine owns which job is the whole skill. Most of the time a requirement that sounds like "we need a rule for X" maps cleanly onto exactly one of them.
The engines
Business Rules
When a subscription change takes effect, how it prorates, whether it co-terms, and whether it is blocked outright
Rules & Automation → Business Rules
Plan Dependencies
Keeping one charge's quantity in step with another's
Commerce → Catalog
Pricing Rules
Adjusting price — percentage discount or markup, fixed override, or tiered
Rules & Automation → Pricing Rules
Policy Engine
Hard ceilings no channel may exceed, such as a maximum discount or a seat limit
Rules & Automation → Policies
Territory Rules
Which accounts a CSR or partner can see and act on
Settings → Profiles
Product Sets
Which plans and add-ons are offered, and how they constrain each other
Commerce → Product Sets
What a Business Rule can and cannot do
Business Rules are the most commonly misunderstood engine, so it is worth being precise. A business rule matches on a direction — upgrade, downgrade, cancellation, add-on, or remove add-on — optionally scoped to products, categories, plans, or audiences, and optionally limited to the customer or CSR surface.
When it matches, it can do exactly four things:
set the change timing (immediate, end of term, custom delay, grace period, next chargeable period, or paying-plan activation),
set the proration (full, prorated, or none),
co-term the change to the base subscription,
or block the change entirely.
That is the complete vocabulary. A business rule cannot show or hide a journey step, cannot remove a product from a cart, cannot raise a custom message, and cannot run arbitrary logic. Requirements of that shape belong to a different engine — see the recipes below.
Rules do not carry a priority number. When several match, the most specific one wins: audience and plan beats audience and product, which beats plan, then product, then category, then an audience-wide rule, then a tenant-wide default. A rule scoped to a specific surface edges out an equally specific rule that applies to any surface, and if two rules are still tied, the most recently updated one is used.
Recipes
Match quantity across plans — keep one charge's quantity in step with another.
Hide plans based on existing subscription products — show a customer only the plans that make sense for what they already own.
Plan selection and deactivation — require or exclude add-ons based on what else is selected.
Raise an error — stop a flow with a message you write.
Enforce product quantity — cap how many units an order may contain.
Automated product removal — drop selections that are no longer valid.
Related
Rules Overview — the same engines described for administrators.
Creating and Managing Rule Sets — the Business Rules form, field by field.
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