E-commerce Repricing: All you need to know

It’s 5:30 in the evening at the office and you are about to leave for home. You book an Uber, and due to high demand, the rates are touching the skies. At the very same time, your boss called you up for some urgent work, you went and after completing the work, you again opened the Uber app at around 6:10 for a cab.

And rate you saw was some 35% lesser than earlier.

That’s how Uber uses the repricing technique.

The basic definition of ‘eCommerce repricing’ goes this way …

Repricing is basically a method of updating the prices of products across your eCommerce sites, in real time, by using automation and technology.

 

The concept of repricing in e-commerce

Pricing is the backbone of the e-commerce world. It is found that 90% of online buyers spend their time online, to find the best deal and offers for the items they are willing to buy.

Product quality and quantity are not the only criteria for pricing, it also depends on the location where it is being sold, that consumer requirements for that particular product and at the end the demand.

Repricing technique was made most popular by the airline and travel industries. If you know the tickets for the flights were high when the booking dates short and vice-versa.

Stephen Hart who is CEO of Cardswitcher says…

“Repricing itself usually takes the form of automated software hooked up to your various eCommerce sites, monitoring changes in the prices offered by your competitors. When a change in price is detected (for competitor’s product), the software will adjust your own prices as a result, keeping you ahead of the rest of your competition.”

The concept is a useful way to keep your prices as relevant as possible to your marketplace. It can take a lot of time and effort to get initially set up though, so always bear this thing in mind if you’re thinking of investing in it.

Yigit Kocak, the inbound marketing manager at Prisync shares insights on repricing

“Repricing is increasing/decreasing the price of a group or individual product prices according to certain rule sets for your e-commerce store.”

 

E-commerce repricing scenarios

There are 5 most common scenarios in which e-commerce sellers use repricing.

1) Providing the cheapest prices in the market and repricing products based on the cheapest price in the market.

Good for: Price-sensitive products like common groceries, electronics.

Pros: Higher sales volumes

Cons: Lower profit margins

2) Using a premium pricing strategy when you’re selling premium prices where you reprice on being the most expensive compared to the highest price in the market.

Good for: Premium or luxury products

Pros: Higher profit margins

Cons: Lower sales volumes

3)  Repricing based on a category of products like Android phones, casual shoes, home appliances etc.

Good for: Most competitive categories in the market

Pros: Become a go-to store for a certain category

Cons: Categorization of your store, losing other category sales

4) Repricing based on brands of products like Apple, Michael Kors, Gucci etc.

Good for: Most popular brands in the market

Pros: Improved brand relationships and incentives

Cons: Risk of having a decreasing relationship with other brands

5) Cost-based repricing if operational and overhead costs are changing frequently and businesses expect to keep a stable profit margin.

Good for: Manufacturers and brands

Pros: Easily applicable, steady business

Cons: Risk of underpricing, lower conversion rates

 

Devin Beverage, a Business Strategist at Dev Bev, comments, “Repricing is an unorthodox way of approaching price strategy. Prices are typically fixed in e-commerce, however, modern challenges require new approaches”.

For example, when offering products through multiple channels, for some owned and some third-party products, there is a benefit to repricing. This is essentially what repricing is – a concept describing a modern way to update prices :

• in an automated way
• in multiple channels
• with prices personalized by each channel
• in real time and
• with high frequency

 

E-commerce Repricing Software

There are many e-commerce repricing software available that can handle the pricing, as well as repricing of your online products across multiple e-commerce platforms and marketplaces, also known as Repricer.

This repricing software lets sellers/retailers to increase or decrease the product price across all the online sales channel automatically, in accordance with a predetermined pricing strategy.

This saves you a lot of time and efforts spent in manually repricing for a large amount of stock, also risks associated with human errors. Repricing software is also beneficial since it takes action in real-time, and has you outperform other sellers in seconds with best pricing offers.

 

Pros and cons of eCommerce Repricing software

Pros

• Less time consuming
• Efficient
• Scheduled
• Helps get Buy Box on platforms like Amazon

Repricing software has resulted in higher sales not just for giants like Walmart and Amazon, but also small and big e-commerce players selling on them.

Since 2013, Walmart has changed its product prices 50,000 times per month. This led to a 30% boost in sales!

Picking the right Amazon repricing software, not only helps boost your sales and expand your profits, but also keeps you in healthy competition by constantly analyzing your selected Amazon marketplaces and remodeling your prices accordingly.

Repricing software also provides a warning signal for shifting demand, even adjusts prices for the predicted unsold inventory to get sold.

Cons

• Software to get started can be expensive
• Data integrity is essential
• Requires monitoring

Customers can also get frustrated when they notice repricing. This is especially common in airlines.

Repricing works for a wide variety of products, but is especially useful for those sold cross-platform, and those whose demand is constantly shifting for, like airline miles. The wrong choice may cost you more than usual, which is why you need to be careful with the repricer tool that you choose for your e-commerce business.

Many retailers avoid using repricing software for a variety of reasons, but most importantly because of the loss of autonomy and control over their pricing – especially when something goes wrong. For example, this past holidays’ season a repricing software malfunctioned and lowered many Amazon sellers’ product price down to a penny.

Airlines are seeking to maximize their profit every minute that they can, down to the last seat. Dynamic repricing allows them to do that. Thankfully, the software makes this process a lot easier. Also, Amazon relies on repricing heavily – their product prices are updated every 10 minutes.

Now let’s gain some idea of repricing techniques and tools for Amazon – the largest online marketplace ever.

 

Amazon Repricing  Software

Studies have found that 44% of shoppers look for a product on Amazon first, before looking it anywhere else online.

Amazon’s repricing strategy consists of multiple factors that help it to be the best at the game of pricing, and there are tools available which allow retailers to reprice similarly to Amazon. Repricing software is an effective tool for arbitrage sellers on Amazon and is a secret reason held by the bigger sellers who dominate the marketplace.

Repricing your Amazon listing is not at all cakewalk thing, but by using one of the many repricing tools out there, it can automatically set the optimized price for you so you won’t be worried about determining whether or not your price is fair. Amazon repricer will help you generate more business and makes you stay, on top of your e-commerce game automatically.

Here are few good Amazon repricing software (Amazon repricer) comparison listed with pricing and short feature description.

Amazon Repricing Software or Amazon Repricer	Pricing	Major Amazon Marketplace countries	Short description
Xsellco	$69 – $379   14 days of free trial available	US, UK	Analyze the success of each SKU, set rules to compete against other merchants and win you the Amazons’ Buy Box.

Bqool	$25- $100   14 days of free trial available	US, UK	It has an embedded price and profit calculator. Has Price & Profit Calculator and Schedule Repricing feature
Seller Snap	$500- $800   15 days of free trial available	US, CA, MX, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES	It offers you a fully automated, proprietary AI-powered Game Theory Repricer to take advantage of game theory principles for your Amazon store optimization.
Repricer Express	$52- $250   15 days free trial available	US, UK, CA, DE, FR, IT, ES, JP	With it, you can make bulk changes to your listings via CSV files. Also, view your Amazon channel statuses and number of SKUs repricing on each
Pricing lab	$58 – $220	US, UK NL, FR, ES, IR, IT	It is fully customizable Amazon repricing software which also monitors your competitor’s pricing across all marketplaces.

 

Conclusion

Changing the price of a product is a standard business practice and your competitors are already leveraging it. The price was, is and will continue being one of the key variables influencing the purchasing decision of buyers in the digital world – and also a key tool used for marketing.

Repricing your online products is a must-apply strategy for a highly crowded, competitive and price-sensitive game. Therefore get your fingers stretched – choose the best Amazon repricer – that suits your business needs – and keep pricing,  I mean, repricing your online products listed on Amazon. Happy repricing, happy selling!!