This is a tricky question. There are different motivations for this and different strategies for implementation. The simple answer is that there isn’t a single answer for everyone.

Lets start by comparing the advantages and disadvantages to using an auto repricer such as Informed.co.

Pros:

  • Spend less time managing prices
  • Automatically raise prices when competition fades
  • Quickly reduce slow moving inventory
  • Sell a larger volume of products while doing less work

Cons:

  • Price
  • Mistakes in setup can cost you
  • Learning curve

Honestly, the more I think about it the list of cons are easily debunked and I could probably add more benefits. I tried every repricing tool and program that offered a free trial and some of them were so bad they should have paid me to try them. Some didn’t work at all and some left all the repricing to an algorithm that couldn’t be explained. The was one, however, that not only worked but made sense. That was Informed. I have been using this repricer exclusively for years and have had some pretty impressive results.

There is one product I carry which I usually see 5-10 units sell per day. If I didn’t see any sell I would go to the listing and see what was going on. Sometimes someone was beating me by a penny so I would never get the buy box. I could simply match their price and continue selling. These instances add up over time and it’s a hassle having to check every product all the time to make sure you are still competitive.

On the other side the Amazon Inventory management does not make it easy to raise prices. When it comes to raising prices you have to go to each listing and see what the competition is at. You might be two dollars below the next seller but there is no way to know without physically checking this.  Informed can handle this automatically by adjusting your price to match the competition or beat the competition.

Strategies

Here are the main strategies I employ to manage pricing automatically.

Match

With this strategy I want to match the lowest FBA price as long as the price is within my defined minimum and maximum prices. This strategy works great for most products that I carry regularly which maintain a good sales rank.

Informed allows for much more customization as well. For instance, in my Match strategy I also:

  • Allow my price to be 20% higher than any non FBA seller
  • Exclude anyone with backordered inventory
  • Never lower my price if I already have the buy box
  • Exclude competition that is not buy box eligible
  • Exclude sellers with a feedback of less than 80% positive

This is all done automatically. The only effort on my part is to assign listings to a strategy and set minimum and maximum prices.

Reduce

I use this strategy when I want to reduce the quantity of a product or this is something that is slow moving that I have decided I will not carry again. This strategy is set to:

  • Beat the lowest FBA competition by .07
  • Beat Amazon by .13
  • Ignore non FBA competition

This has worked really well for me. In fact, there were many items that I didn’t even realize were still in my inventory that hadn’t sold in a long time. Within a week of employing the reduce strategy about a third of these products were sold.

I encourage you to take advantage of the Informed free trial. In the very least you can get rid of stagnant inventory and go back to your old life without paying a dime. On the other hand if you would like more information on the product check out my Informed category. I will be adding more articles, how to’s, tips and tricks as time goes on.