Using Price Books

Using Price Books

I'm having trouble understanding how to use price books. We have four levels of prices for each of our products (retail pricing and 3 levels of reseller pricing). What I'd like to do is have the ability to assign a pricing level depending on the type of customer.

Here's what I'd like to do:

1. Be able to bulk add products to price books, this way I don't have to manually enter product pricing for each product/level. With 600 products that would be 2400 manually entered prices(!).

2. Connect an account to a specific price book. I'd like to be able to create a quote quickly and efficiently by having a default price book for the various levels of accounts.

I'm rather surprised that I haven't been able to find a better way to do this.