In this article, you’ll learn how to automate pricing for your products on Amazon by using repricer rules.
If you want to capture more sales, even if you’re sleeping, repricer rules are going to be critical to your business.
Not only does it help you become a more effective seller, but setting up repricing rules is totally free and built right into Seller Central.
They’re easy to use, simple to adjust, and powerful additions to a successful FBA business (especially online arbitrage).
Rather than watching your products like a hawk and manually adjusting your prices every five minutes, you can set rules that will automatically adjust the price depending on your targets.
Today we’re going to cover what kinds of rules you can set, what kinds of rules you should set, and how to actually set them up so you can stop worrying if your products are priced accurately.
At the end of the lesson, you’ll know exactly how automated rules on Amazon work, which settings will make the biggest impact on your sales, and how to avoid one of the biggest mistakes Amazon sellers make with their pricing.
Amazon Repricing Basics
If you don’t set up repricing rules for your inventory, you’re going to waste a lot of time manually doing it yourself.
Many sellers on Amazon use repricing rules to manage their products, so if you don’t, you’re missing out on a competitive advantage as they’ll always be one step ahead of you.
Let’s cover how you can set up your repricer.
To start, navigate to pricing, then automate pricing. Here you can create a new pricing rule.
First, you’ll need to choose what type of rule you’d like to set up.
The rule options at the time of creating this tutorial are “Competitive Buy Box,” “Competitive Lowest Price,” “Competitive External Price,” and “Based on Sales Units.”
Each rule has a different goal and will affect your pricing differently. Before you apply a rule, you need to determine what the point of the rule is.
If your goal is to stay competitively priced with other 3rd party sellers, you’ll probably want to set a “Competitive Buy Box” rule that matches the buy box price.
However, if you’ve been sitting on inventory for a few months and just can’t seem to move it, you’ll possibly want to automate pricing to undercut your competitors and regain some of that money back.
You can do that with a “Competitive Buy Box” rule that undercuts the buy box price by a set amount or a “Based on Sales Units” rule that undercuts the price based on low-velocity products.
Repricing Rule Setup
Whichever type you pick, you’ll want to give it a clear, identifiable name. You’ll be applying this rule to your products, so make sure you’ll know how it will affect a product’s price.
If you accidentally apply the wrong rule to a product, it can be very costly – automation works both ways.
Next, we’ll select the marketplace you want this rule to apply to. You can set rules specifically for a marketplace – if you sell on Amazon.com AND Amazon.ca, for example, and want different rules to apply, you can select them here.
After you’ve selected the marketplace, we’ll set up the rule parameters.
These parameters will be applied to every product you have the rule automate pricing for, so think carefully about how strict or loose you set them.
Depending on what type of rule you choose, your attributes to choose from will be different. You can learn about what our preferred parameters for each rule type are here!!!!!
Once you’ve set up how you’d like your repricing rule to act, it still won’t be active until you apply it to your products. To do that, click “proceed to SKU selection.” Here you have all the products that are eligible to apply an automated rule.
A very important part of making the most out of an automatic repricer is to know your costs & profitability. How else are you going to know what to price at?
To prevent your prices from getting out of control, set your minimum and maximum price for each product based on how aggressively you want to sell your products.
The lower the min and max price, the faster you will likely sell (but the less profit you will probably make). This is often a balance of time and profitability, and that’s why you should set up multiple rules.
If you just got these products in stock and want to make the most of any potential profits, there’s no need to set the minimum price to breakeven.
You can even set the minimum price to still make a profit – only after enough time should you price more aggressively.
When you’ve been sitting on products for several months and they still haven’t gone anywhere, then would I recommend applying a rule that undercuts the buy box.
The last step you need to take to make the rule active is to apply it to your products. To do this, you can either choose products individually or select them in bulk with the grey checkbox to the left of each SKU.
Whichever way you choose, select the rule you want to apply from the “action” column.
You should see a notification that Amazon is now repricing that product.
Now you can relax knowing that it’s being taken care of 24/7. You’ll find that setting repricing rules through Amazon not only saves you time, but it makes you a more effective seller.
Your products will be priced more competitively than you ever could manually; especially when you have dozens, if not hundreds of products, you will not be able to keep manual repricing up at scale.
Read below to learn about our recommended settings for the most important rules you can set.
Suggested Repricing Rules
Buy Box Match
A buy box match rule is essential to staying competitive while keeping your margins healthy at the same time.
You can learn more about how to win the buy box here, but one of the biggest factors that goes into it is your price. A matching rule keeps you competitive while preserving profits.
The buy box match rule should be your bread and butter unless you’ve tried to sell a product for a while and haven’t gotten movement over the course of a few months.
Until then, you can either set the rule with parameters that compete with Amazon and FBA sellers:
or just other FBA sellers:
Buy Box Underprice
One of the biggest mistakes sellers make with their pricing is that they get impatient and undercut the buy box price if they don’t get immediate sales.
There is no need to undercut and it is often in your worst interest to do so. If one seller starts to undercut the price, another may follow and undercut that seller.
This creates a back and forth lowered pricing (which is particularly worsened if it’s on an automatic rule) that makes things unprofitable for everyone else.
This rule is only to be used if you’ve tried unsuccessfully to sell the product. Be careful about using it, as it will typically drive the price down more than you would expect for the reasons outlined above.
To set parameters that compete with Amazon and FBA sellers:
or only FBA sellers:
Optional Repricer Rules
These rules are highly optional but may give you a competitive edge if used appropriately.
Sell Through on Units
This rule could be used in place of the Buy Box Undercut rule if the product is moving slow enough. Lower by the percentage that makes the most sense for the products – 20% might be too aggressive for some products, but exactly what other products need to get moving.
Match External Offers
Although customers love Prime shipping and will remain loyal to Amazon to an extent, if the prices from other retailers are tempting enough, they may just shop there instead.
If you’re selling products that are priced much higher on Amazon than on other platforms, you might consider an external price match.
I caution you to make sure your minimum price per product is set appropriately so you don’t lose money if they decide to lower their price drastically, however. This rule typically works better if you’re one of the only sellers for the listing.
Closing Thoughts
Play around with the repricer rules that work best for your business. It’s best to have a diverse set to be able to adapt to different situations.
If you want to put repricer rules to the test, join our Rookie Leads – a weekly dose of 5 free product leads that you can use today. This free online arbitrage sourcing list is a great, risk-free way to practice until you’re ready to join one of our pro Atlas lists.
Leave a Reply