Why You Should Care About High Scale Price Books in Salesforce

1. Here’s the short version:
2. A quick example:
3. So, what’s the catch?
4. How to enable it:
Why You Should Care About High Scale Price Books in Salesforce

Why You Should Care About High Scale Price Books in Salesforce

  • Jonatan Jumbert

  • 2 minute read

Let’s be honest: price books in Salesforce Commerce Cloud can be a pain when you’re managing a ton of products. If you’ve ever sat there watching an import crawl like a snail, or had to wait forever for the prices to update in the search results… this is for you.

Let me introduce you to High Scale Price Books. Also called Read-Only Price Books. Sounds fancy, but the concept is simple:

Instead of loading your price books into Business Manager the usual way (where you can edit them manually), you load them in read-only mode using XML files.

Why would you want to do that?

Here’s the short version:

  • They import up to 60% faster than the regular ones.

  • You don’t need to reindex the search just to see price updates. That’s right — no more waiting for indexing.

  • You can handle up to 300 million prices. That’s not a typo. Three. Hundred. Million.

  • Ideal if you're pulling prices from a PIM or any external system on a regular basis.

A quick example:

Let’s say you manage a site with 100,000 SKUs and you update prices every night. With normal price books, you’d:

  1. Import the file.

  2. Wait.

  3. Kick off a reindex.

  4. Wait again.

  5. Cross your fingers everything shows up.

With read-only price books, it’s:

  1. Import the file.

  2. Done.

No clicks. No reindexing. No drama.

So, what’s the catch?

Well, you can’t edit these price books in Business Manager. At all. They’re read-only. If you want to change anything, you update your XML and reimport it. That’s the deal.

If you’re the type of merchant who only has a couple of price books and likes tweaking them manually, this might not be for you. But if you’re importing thousands of prices a day from an external system — this is a game-changer.

How to enable it:

Salesforce doesn’t turn this on by default. You have to:

  1. Go to Administration > Global Preferences > Feature Switches.

  2. Flip the switch called Enable High Scale Price Books Feature (sometimes labeled as Enable Optimized Price Books Feature).

  3. Then go to import preferences and enable Import All Price Books as Read-Only.

That’s it. Once it’s on, your price book imports will be smoother than ever.

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