Repricing is a key strategic tactic for almost all Amazon sellers. Prices change all the time on the Amazon marketplace, and you don’t want to get priced out by more competitive sellers.
But just because you know repricing is important, you may not know the best way to go about it. You essentially have two options:
- Manual repricing
- Automated repricing
In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at both to help you decide which is best and why.
TL;DR
- Repricing on Amazon is essential, and you can use both manual and automated repricing.
- While manual repricing is free, the benefits end there.
- Automated repricing has many more benefits than manual repricing, including being a lot faster and helping you make more sales and increase profits.
- If you choose automated repricing, find a repricing tool that comes with all the features you need to optimize your pricing strategy.
Manual Repricing: Overview
Manual repricing is the process of changing the price of your Amazon listings manually.
This is relatively easy to do in Seller Central. You can simply go to ‘Manage Inventory,’ find your listing, and change the price. This will then be updated in the marketplace after a short delay.
A manual repricing strategy would entail changing the price of your listings multiple times a day. You’d need to keep track of your competitors’ listings, spot when they change their prices, and react by changing your own prices based on your goals.
For example, if one of your competitors lowers the price of their listing, you can lower yours even further. This will help to ensure your listing is more competitively priced, which could help to get more sales.
However, this could also lead to a race to the bottom, so it’s important to create a clear strategy you can stick to in order to avoid this.
Automated Repricing: Overview
Automated repricing uses the same basic principle. You change your price in response to an action, like your competitor lowering their price.
However, this time, you use automated repricing software.
Using Amazon repricing tools like Repricer, you can set up the tool to react based on specific rules. For example, you can set a minimum and maximum price, and then let it work in the background.
The Amazon repricing software will automatically detect when your competitors change their prices or run out of stock. It will then use your rules to determine which action to take.
With automatic repricers, you don’t have to do a thing. Once you’ve set up your automated Amazon repricer, it’ll do all the work for you.
Why Choose Manual Repricing?
Manual repricing only really has one thing going for it: the cost.
That’s because manual repricing is, essentially, free. You do all of the work yourself, and you don’t need to invest in a third-party tool.
You’ll need to keep a close eye on your competitors so you can see when a competing product listing has gone down in price. And you can then change the price of your product manually—and hopefully get more sales.
If you only have one product, or a couple, this may be achievable. But even in this case, you might find that manual repricing takes up too much of your time.
Constantly monitoring your competitors isn’t the best use of your time. And you may miss price changes, reacting to them too late and missing out on extra sales.
If that doesn’t sound ideal to you, you may prefer automated repricing. Let’s take a look at the benefits of automating your Amazon repricing.
Related: 10 Reasons to Stop Manual Amazon Repricing Immediately
Why Choose Automated Repricing?
Automated repricing has many advantages compared to manual repricing. As such, most serious Amazon sellers will not even consider doing their repricing manually. It’s just not worth it.
Here are some of the major advantages of investing in a repricing tool instead of changing prices on your own.
It’s Much Faster
Let’s start with one of the most important points: automated repricing is much faster than manual repricing. There’s no comparison.
Imagine monitoring your main competitors on a daily basis at all hours of the day and night to see what they do. Then having to manually change your listing’s price based on the behavior of your competitors.
Now imagine doing that for multiple product listings. You won’t have any time left to do anything else.
You may determine that repricing isn’t worth your time or effort. But this would see you miss out on potential sales. You’re letting your competitors get away with making more sales at your expense.
Automatic repricers are fast. Tools like Repricer are especially fast. They will automatically detect whenever your competitors change their prices, and they will react based on the rules you have set.
That may mean dropping or increasing the price by making small price adjustments at other times, and it’s not always about making your product the cheapest.
Save Time to Focus on Other Tasks
Not only are automated repricers fast, but they also do everything in the background.
Smart Amazon business owners know that one of the secrets to success is automation—not just on Amazon, but with any eCommerce business. There are certain tasks that are ideal for automation.
Tasks that take up a lot of your time and that do not require your expert input are the tasks that you should be automating—and repricing is right at the top of the list.
Just think of all the time you could save to invest in other areas of your business like optimizing your listings, providing better customer service, mastering Amazon advertising, and sourcing your next product.
With these tasks, you can input your unique value, and they’re much harder to automate.
You only have a certain amount of hours in the day. Make sure you’re using your time to focus on the tasks where you can generate real value for your business.
Save hours of time by handing your repricing over to a dedicated repricing tool, and focus on growing your business.
Reduce Mistakes
Another one of the key advantages of automated repricing over manual repricing is that you can minimize and even eliminate mistakes.
Humans make mistakes. Whether you’re doing your repricing work yourself or handing the task over to a virtual assistant, you can guarantee that mistakes will be made at some point.
We get tired, type the wrong thing in the wrong place—and when it comes to the price of your product, making such a mistake could be a serious problem.
When you use an automated repricer, you don’t have to worry about human error.
You just set your rules up at the start and let the software get on with it. You can set a minimum price, and the repricing tool won’t go below this, and you can also set a maximum.
There’s a lot more you can do with repricers, and this is just the start. But one thing you know you can do is let the software get on with the work with complete peace of mind because it won’t make the same mistakes humans are prone to making.
Make More Sales
One of the key reasons to have a pricing strategy in the first place is to make more sales.
By making your products more tempting to shoppers, you hope to make them stand out above the competition.
Automated repricing tools supercharge this. While you may be able to increase sales slightly by manually repricing your product listings, it’s nothing compared to the extra sales you could make by using an automated repricer.
Your repricing tool could change the price of your products multiple times a day to react to multiple competitor price changes.
It could also change the price when your main competitor runs out of stock. Suddenly, you can start charging more and increase profit margins on each sale.
Automated tools like Repricer help you win the Buy Box, which is where the vast majority of Amazon sales are made. You can make this your primary goal when you’re setting up your rules.
By winning the Buy Box more frequently, you’ll get in front of more shoppers, and this will naturally lead to more sales.
But here’s the really smart thing—a repricing tool like Repricer can even help you to keep the Buy Box once you have won it.
And it can help to maximize profits while you have the Buy Box by incrementally increasing the price of your listing, so you can take full advantage of your position as Buy Box winner.
Save Money
We already mentioned that manual repricing is free. So how does automated repricing compete with this?
It all comes down to the time you save plus the extra sales you can make and the extra profits you can generate when you use an automatic repricer.
Essentially, this is a combination of all the above points.
- You can put more time into valuable tasks that help you grow your business.
- You can win the Buy Box more frequently and increase sales.
- You can increase profits by using smart repricing tactics that earn you more on your sales.
The amount that this could save you overall can make a huge difference to your business. There’s a very good chance it will make up for the cost of your repricing tool, while freeing up your time.
That’s got to be worth at least trying.
Verdict? Choose an Automated Repricer
Using an automated repricer is the best decision in almost any situation. Even if you only sell a single product on Amazon, the time you’ll waste doing your repricing manually simply isn’t worth it.
The amount you can save in terms of time, and the extra profits you can make in terms of sales, will more than make up for the cost of the repricer.
One option you may want to consider is starting off with manual repricing, but just for the first week or so. You can use this to get a better idea of what repricing involves and why it’s important.
You can also appreciate just how much time you’ll be able to save by automating the process.
After you’ve got your head around manual repricing, the best thing you can do is try out an automated repricer.
You can start using Repricer for free for 14 days, so see for yourself just how much it can do for your business.
