By Erik Mathes
A guest post from Erik at Appeagle discussing the power and benefits of a high-quality automated repricer:
If you sell on Amazon and/or eBay, then chances are you’ve heard of automated repricing software, also known as repricers. The job of a repricer is simple: To constantly adjust and update the prices of your listings relative to the prices of your competitors.
Sellers use automated repricers to stay competitive at all times without having to perform the tedious work of manually updating their prices after doing incredibly time-consuming research to see what competitors are charging for identical goods.
Repricing software comes in all shapes and sizes, from no-frills repricers with minimal functionality to $1,000+/month software suites that perform multiple tasks beyond repricing, but charge an additional percentage of sales beyond the four-figure base cost.
In the middle of these extremes you find Appeagle, a software dedicated to high-performance automated repricing on Amazon, eBay, and as of this spring, Walmart Marketplace.
As a dedicated repricing software, Appeagle has come to define what a high-quality repricer should be, offering sellers the option to use algorithmic repricing and rules-based repricing to manage your prices, depending on what you deem best for each listing at any given time.
We’ll dig deeper into the differences algorithmic and rules-based repricing later. For now, let’s start with why you should consider adding an automated repricer to your arsenal of online selling tools.
The case for using an automated repricer on Amazon
If you haven’t noticed, there are tons of people selling identical items on Amazon.
That means that in order to get sales, you need to price your products competitively enough to win the Buy Box, that prized piece of digital real estate where you find the “Add to Cart” button on the majority of Amazon listings pages.
(Some listings pages have what’s known as a “suppressed Buy Box” where there’s no “Add to Cart” button, and instead you find a “See All Buying Options” button leading to the full list of sellers of a particular item, but this is rare.)
To win the Buy Box, sellers must have stellar performance metrics, such as a high seller rating and feedback score, and low order defect rate, pre-fulfillment cancel rate, and late shipment rate.
But those are far from the most important factors when it comes to winning the Buy Box.
Above all else comes fulfillment method and landed price (a.k.a. selling price + shipping price).
While it’s relatively simple to manage your fulfillment method by deciding between FBA or MFN, a.k.a. fulfilling orders yourself through the Merchant Fulfilled Network (or, if you have good enough seller metrics, Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP), which affords top MFN sellers the privilege of offering free Prime 2-Day Shipping to customers), it’s not as easy to manually manage your listing prices.
That’s because with so many competitors across different time zones constantly changing their prices in an effort to stay competitive, it’s virtually impossible for you to keep up.
Between monitoring your competitors’ prices and then making manual updates via Seller Central, the tedious work of manual repricing can cause you to burn out fast due to its never-ending nature. Not to mention how ineffective and inefficient it is to manually adjust your prices.
That’s where automated repricing comes into play.
What a high-quality repricer allows you to do
Instead of wasting countless hours doing mind-numbing manual repricing work with minimal effectiveness, an automated repricer performs the same work 24/7 with exponentially higher effectiveness.
When you first start using a repricer, the setup requires having a solid understanding of your costs, from sourcing to shipping, fulfillment fees to potential returns, so you can set up price thresholds (known as your minimum and maximum, or min and max prices).
Setting these price floors and ceilings correctly ensures that you’ll never sell at a loss, you’ll lock in a minimal profit that you’re comfortable with at your lowest possible selling price, and you won’t overprice your products relative to the market.
Once you input your min and max prices for your listings (which you can conveniently do in bulk via .csv or .txt file uploads with Appeagle), you’re ready to start planning your repricing strategies.
With a high-quality repricer like Appeagle, you’ll be able to choose between algorithmic repricing and rules-based repricing to power your listings into the Buy Box and generate more sales.
Algorithmic versus rules-based repricing strategies
Algorithmic repricing utilizes an intelligent algorithm developed by our engineers and in-house team of veteran online sellers known as our “Get the Buy Box” strategy.
The best part about it is that it doesn’t require any additional thinking from you. Simply select Get the Buy Box as the strategy for any listings you want to use it on, and let it get to work constantly adjusting your prices relative to the current Buy Box price until you win the Buy Box yourself.
Rules-based repricing is your other option, and within in, you have a bounty of choices when it comes to customizable strategies that let you determine exactly how you’d like to compete on any given listings.
For starters, you can decide whether you want to price below, price above, or price match competition.
Beyond that, you can base your custom strategies on everything from:
- Fulfillment type (all competitors, FBA only, MFN only, Buy Box price, and more)
- Seller rating
- Number of handling days
- Backordered status
- Featured Merchant status
- And for eBay, feedback rating and top-rated seller status
You can even exclude specific sellers by name, exclude Amazon entirely, and compete differently against FBA sellers, MFN sellers, and Amazon on the same listing.
And if you’re not looking to create your own rules-based repricing strategies and prefer a simple alternative, Appeagle also includes pre-configured strategies that let you compete with Featured Merchants or compete with the lowest price.
The bottom line on automated repricing
In life, you can boil the cost of most things down to time and money.
While a repricer adds a monthly cost to your business budget, the amount of time it saves you from unpleasant, unproductive work is so massive it’s impossible to calculate.
Beyond that, sellers will gladly tell you that their investment in repricing software pays for itself fast, as it leads to an increase in Buy Box share, and, as a result, more exposure, more sales, and more profits. Not to mention that it affords savvy sellers the chance to live a life on their own terms instead of being stuck behind a computer screen doing manual price changes (or paying an employee much more than the monthly cost of a repricer to perform the same task with less efficiency).
We’d love for you to experience the power of Appeagle’s automated repricing software to see if it can boost your business the way it has for so many other sellers.
That’s why we’re inviting JoeLister blog readers to test out Appeagle with a 14-day free trial. Just follow this link to our website to get started, and if you ever have any questions, feel free to contact support@appeagle.com.
Promo code is only valid for new Appeagle users and for Premium and Enterprise plans. Not valid in combination with any other promo codes. Promotion valid through September 30th, 2017.
