[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the cutthroat world of profit and margins, you have to have an edge. Listing and selling your products on Amazon requires some strategy and skill of you want to win the buy box or get your fair share of the profit. Amazon recently introduced a re-pricer to help you sell more but there not necessarily interested in helping you get more of that margin. They want to turn as many items as possible because their warehouses are filling up and there bringing on hundreds of thousands of new sellers every year.
So how will you keep up with other sellers? With Repriceit…
You need a re-pricer and one of the most affordable ones on the market today is RepriceIt. We don’t have an affiliation with them, we just like them. From one software company to another. They are priced competitively, they’re affordable even for the newest of sellers and they are pretty simple to implement in your selling strategy.
If this ever changes, we’ll let you know and recommend someone else, but until then…RepriceIt has our vote.
So we wanted to provide you a guide to setting up your first template within RepriceIt so you’re ready to go from Day 1. Check out each tab to understand the ins-and-outs of the pricing rules template. One mistake could either cost you a lot of time or a lot of money.
Section 1
In the first section of the template, you’re asked to decide if you would like to “co-mingle” your competitiveness against different condition grades. So if you’re selling a product in “new condition”, do you want to price it competitively against the same product in “used” condition? Probably not since the “new” version of yours should fetch a higher price. This seems like a no-brainer, so keep these checked at all times.
Next up, it’s asking you if you even want to bother pricing competitively against products that are in “used-acceptable” condition. “Acceptable” condition is the lowest condition grade you can put on a product and so unless the product is really rare, your profit shouldn’t be that great on it so why bother pricing to try to win the sale?
And in the last two sections RepriceIt wants to know if you want to be competitive against new sellers or those with a seller rating below “XX%”. And the answer typically is NO. Amazon will reward the more experienced seller with better feedback ratings over the new and less reviewed seller. So keep these marked and choose 90%.
Section 2
This next section is really about your “floor” and your “ceiling” when it comes to selling on Amazon. What is the absolute lowest price you’ll sell ANY of your products for? We have ours set at $7.99 because even if you bought a CD and flipped it on Amazon for $7.99 you’re only going to make $3. But some business are ok with that margin or less because they are dealing in volume. If you’re just starting out, then you probably want to keep it at $10 or higher until you build up some revenue.
The ceiling is really meant to keep you out of trouble. If for some reason their is a ridicoulous price swing up and you don’t have a “ceiling” price set than Amazon will “de-list” the item and then you have to fix it manually via Seller Central. Sorry, this isn’t the stock market and even they halt sales when something is “off.”
Section 3
Sometimes you don’t want to compete against ALL sellers on an item. If there are 90 sellers selling the same thing…then maybe that becomes a “race to the bottom.” But if you choose a really low number then you really are not staying too competitive because you’re only pricing against a few when there are many that could be beating you to the buy box. We have ours set at 10, aggressively.
Sometimes you might only want to reprice an item if there is a lot of competition because if there is not a lot of sellers on any particular item then maybe you’ll sell it anyways because there is so few number of actual products to be sold. Demand is higher than supply. We have ours set to 1 because we want to be in the game on anything with more than 1 seller on it.
If you’re the only seller by contrast on an item, then RepriceIt gives you an opportunity to set a default price for the item. After all, you’re the only one selling it…so have fun and ask for what you want.
And lastly – you could set a safety net for products screaming their way up or down in price by putting in these % fail safes. No reason to ride the bullet train down to the no-profit zone if you can avoid it.
Section 4
Repricing modes are probably the most important section of the entire template so let us break it down for you:
Lowest Possible: This is the best option ONLY when your needing to clear out a bunch of inventory as it will drop your price to the lowest and compete with the bottom sellers on every listing
Same Condition or Better: Same condition or better means you’ll only price and stay competitive with items with the same condition grade. This makes the most sense to us and is the best equivalent to an “apples to apples” comparison.
Buy Box: This makes a lot of sense right? Don’t you always want to win the Buy Box? The problem is, we don’t what the difference is between this setting and the next but will ask Doug the owner and get back you. if you think you might know the answer then please leave it in the comments section below.
Intelligent Pricing: We don’t know how intelligent this option is and the experimenting we’ve done didn’t go so well. When we switched to this setting…our listings flew off the shelf and many a buyer were pleased…but we lost a lot of money. The name sounds cool but it’s a dive on the prices it seems.
Section 5
Typically if Amazon is selling the same item as you then you’re screwed. OK, that was a little dramatic but there is truth in it. Once Amazon hops on your listing and sells the same product, you can bet that they are going to ensure they sell out of their stock. So the best you can do is hop in and hope like help. They do share the buy box but it’s anyone’s guess as to why or when they do it.
That being said, it doesn’t make any sense to price above them and the next question asks how much of a discount do you want to give in order to try to beat the Amazon deal? We chose 9% as we feel a 10% discount almost is enough to persuade the buyer to go with your listing instead of Amazon’s….sometimes. 🙁
When you are competing, the next trigger wants to know by how much will you “under-cut” the next seller when you drop your price? Best to keep it around 1%, you don’t want to start a “race to the bottom!”
Section 6
And lastly, RepriceIt wants to know if you only want to be competitive with other FBA offers or Merchant Fulfilled offers too? The theory is that Amazon FBA gives the buy box more often to FBA sellers so it wouldn’t make any sense to price match with the MF sellers. For that reason, we typically only compare to FBA offers, but you can always accelerate the aggressiveness and match with both types of sellers.
If you “un-check” the section with the warning sign you can experiment with the repricer and see how your changes affect your prices and listings in the reports section BEFORE you upload the changes to Amazon where they will be in effect immediately.
Pulling it all together
For us, and our most sincere advice to you as an Amazon seller is that you must work with a repricer to stay competitive in the Amazon ecosystem and whichever one you choose, make sure you understand how it works so you don’t make a costly mistake.
