Rebates run both ways in distribution. They are earned from suppliers for buying volume and owed to customers for the same reason. They are accounting events rather than pricing events, which is why they normally live in the ERP or in a finance spreadsheet rather than in a price list.
The commerce question is what to display. A buyer working towards a threshold wants to know how close they are, and that figure comes from period-to-date purchase history in the ERP, not from anything the storefront knows on its own. Showing it means a live query and a clear rule about which orders count.
Getting rebates wrong on a storefront shows up as a price dispute. If the site displays a net price that already includes an accrual finance has not agreed to, the invoice will not match the order, and somebody reconciles the difference by hand.
Why it decides a platform
Rebates get confused with tiered discounts during requirements gathering, and they behave differently. A rebate does not change the invoice; a tier does.
Also called: rebates, volume rebate, back-end rebate, rebate program, rebate programme, off-invoice rebate.
Last updated 2026-08-20.