Buy Box winner is the seller whose offer goes into the Amazon cart. So when a customer goes to a product page and clicks “Buy now”/”Jetzt Kaufen”/”Buy Now”, they have that seller’s product in their cart – the one who won the Buy Box. In this example you can see there may be many sellers, like 18 in this case, but only one offer goes straight to the cart:
Automated pricing policy on Amazon, or Amazon repricing system, is simply an intelligent way to manage prices. It’s a tool that changes product prices without our involvement, but according to rules we set.
A tool designed primarily for retailers and resellers. It works well when you’re selling a product that other sellers also have in their offer and you’re competing to win the Buy Box. For example, branded clothing, footwear, home appliances, interior equipment, etc.
How Does a Repricer Work and What is it for?
When adding a product to Amazon, we set its price. By default, this is a fixed price that remains unchanged until we manually change it, through files, or using external tools (3rd party software).
When we set a fixed product price at 99.99 EURO and the competition is at 99.79, most likely the competitor’s offer wins the cart – becomes the Buy Box winner – and sells the product.
In such situations, a repricer comes to the rescue, because 99% of the time winning the cart depends on price.
So we still have a price of 99.99 Euro, and the competition has 99.79 Euro. Thanks to the repricer, we set minimum and maximum prices for the product.
We set the minimum at 95 Euro. We also add a condition that the price will decrease by, for example, 0.1 Euro compared to the competition. So if we initially have 99.99 EURO and the competition has 99.79 EURO, the repricer will lower our price to 99.69 EURO. This should help us win the cart. Of course, the competition might also use a repricer.
That’s why we provide a minimum price as the lower limit to which we can compete on price with the competition. The system will gradually lower the price in response to competitor actions.
The repricer also has the ability to add a maximum price for the product.
This is a very useful feature. When the competition sells out and at that moment only we have the product, its price will automatically increase to the specified amount.
So if a product normally costs 99.99 EURO with us, but at a given moment only we have this product on Amazon, its price can go up to, for example, 109.99 EURO.
Will the customer buy it? If the product is popular and it’s the only offer on Amazon, then absolutely yes.
You shouldn’t overdo it with the maximum price, but you can safely add those 5-15% of the standard price and observe sales. If sales noticeably drop, you can disable the maximum price or lower it.
So by using this option, we can potentially recover smaller profits when the repricer lowered our prices to beat the competition.
Of course, these are basic repricer functions and you can actually set very advanced pricing policy scenarios. However, this will require external tools.
How to Start Using a Repricer?
A simple repricer is already built into Amazon.
I use the repricer provided by M2E Pro, which is an add-on to their tool that integrates Amazon with eBay through the Magento platform. This repricer is easy to use, has all the necessary functions and has been reliable so far. Plus, it’s free.
A very well-known and popular tool is Repricer Express. RepricerExpress offers tons of possibilities. The tool is free for the first 15 days. That’s enough to get to know it and possibly decide to purchase it.
In upcoming articles I’ll describe several repricers and their configuration in more detail.
