Help Me Sell Fuel

Here we provide an overview of the process of selling fuel.

A new and revolutionary motor fuels marketplace, Gasology provides your organization the opportunity to expand your sales reach and your pool of business connections, while simultaneously providing customized incentives for your customers. Just like airlines can price and sell tickets for many months into the future, allowing them to lock in revenue and respond to demand, you can price and sell spot and future fuel on Gasology.

In order to price and sell fuel on the platform, you will follow these five steps:

1. Create facilities
2. Build base prices
   1. Create a price foundation
   2. Design a base price
3. Price products for delivery
4. Customize product pricing for certain Customers
5. Check reservation activity and deliveries

Now, let's help you get better acquainted with working in the Merchant environment.

Create your facilities

After signing up for access to the Gasology platform and completing your individual and company registration, the first step to selling fuel is to create your facilities. These facilities are where your fuel originates and will be the hubs that your customers interact with. Facilities, and their associated products, are the foundation for pricing fuel on Gasology.

In the Facilities manager, users can add facilities and edit all pertinent information for each of their facilities. Each facility will be set up with its own contact information, billing and payment options, products available, and delivery methods.

To learn more about creating and editing facilities, click here.

Build your base price

Create a price foundation with indexes

Now that our facility is set up, we can get to creating the foundation of a product price. Gasology's pricing engine gives you total control over how you build your prices. Within the Gasology platform, indexes are the building blocks that make up product prices.

An index can represent a dollar amount (price indexes) or the quantity of the product (order indexes) you would like to offer for sale.

Indexes can be set manually, or they can lean on an upstream supplier's price and update accordingly. They can also be driven by off-platform pricing inputs. 

To learn more about indexes and how to set them up, click here.

Designing prices

Before we can sell a single gallon of fuel, you must set up a base price for the product for each period. Physically setting a product price for a particular period is executed from the Design manager.

By organizing combinations of price and orders indexes you have you already built, you can craft base prices for each of your products. 

For an in-depth explanation on setting daily prices, click here. If you would to learn how to create forward prices, click here.

Price your products for delivery

After you have set up prices for each period you wish to sell products for, set up a structure that defines how your product is delivered to customers.

Structures add another layer of customization available to merchants who use Gasology. They allow you to select the methods available for delivering your products from your facilities to your customers, and to set any related pricing. 

There are many more options available for the user to customize structures, with more information provided here.

Customize product pricing for your customers

The final step in setting up our framework to sell fuel involves the who. How you sell your fuel to a specific customer is defined in what is known as a program. Gasology lets you define unique programs for each of your customers. 

Programs can be designed to apply to any customer or a specific customer. Closed programs can also be built for a group of customers that you assign customers to allowing you to customize the prices your customers see.

To learn more about programs and how to create them, click here. 

Once your facilities (the where), indexes (the what), structures (the how), and programs (the who) are built, turn your prices on. Turning your price on makes it live and accessible to your connected customers. Great work - you're ready to sell future fuel!

Check out your reservations

With your prices active, watch the reservations for your fuel roll in. In the Activity manager, you can filter, view, and access both new and existing customer reservations by product.

Your next step

Feeling good about selling fuel? Great. Let's move on to the next introductory article and talk about how your reserved gallons move to the customer.