This article explains the correct utilization of StoreAutomator's repricer for maximizing sales and optimizing your profit.
This article explained the correct utilization of StoreAutomator's repricer to maximize your sales and optimize your profit. It is always good to start by explaining how the system works briefly.
How the system works
We receive real-time price change notifications from channels and react to these changes immediately. StoreAutomator's repricer first obtains competitor information from channels and then chooses a logical competitor to compete with based on price, reviews, ratings, ship time and prime status (Amazon only) and then calculates a new price for the item. Upon repricing, new prices are sent to the channel within minutes.
It is recommended that before start using the repricer; you should sit down and study who your competitors are, which price they are at if they are making any sales, how frequently they are dropping down to which price. It would also be best if you studied your own sales limits, like the lowest price on your items, shipping price, perhaps figuring a different profit margin for different products and applying them at product-level repricer settings.
You can program your lowest margin limits; StoreAutomator repricer will not go down there immediately. It will start with the regular price, and if it is allowed, it will lower the price to stay competitive.
Also, if you have no competition, the StoreAutomator repricer will increase the price to a limit allowed by the settings, thus increasing your profitability. It all lies in the settings you will use while programming the repricer. It will require optimum settings or needs to be fine-tuned for each product.
Also, your competitors will not stay down and reciprocate a drop in our price on their own. Once you start using repricer, you need to keep your competitors more within sight and update your repricer settings more than ever.
Tips
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If you want to be competitively priced, you can lower your profit margin and increase your max. discount rate
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If you don’t have competition and would like to sell your products for a high price, you can increase your profit margin or increase max. price factor
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If you like to go below your competitor’s price, just one cent, in the Target Price tab, for price difference method, select fixed, and for the target price difference, enter 0.01.
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If you like to go below your competitor’s price 1%, in the Target Price tab, for Price difference method select Percent, and target price difference enter 1.
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If you ignore competition for your FBA or FBM products, this will turn the repricer off.
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If you would like to use the repricer for your FBA products, select the “Do not ignore any competition” for the FBA products text box in the Competitors tab. If you select “Ignore Non-FBA Competition,” this will exclude all competitors that sell FBM, which may fine-tune your price to become more competitive.
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If you are an established seller and you would like to compete with older sellers, you need to increase your “Competition Min. Rating” and “Competition Min. Feedback” values.
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If you would like to ignore short or very cheap sellers, you need to decrease the “Ignore Price Deviation” percentage level to exclude those sellers from the competition and consequently lowering your price too much.
Reading Repricer Summary Data
Programming the repricer correctly takes reading and understanding all your expenses and the settings available to you correctly. Go to your repricer menu Channel > Repricer and click on the “i” icon to view repricing information on this item; below settings can be seen:
There are ‘Costs’ listed as the product, shipping, handling price, and FBA fees if available on the left-hand side.
On the right-hand side, ‘Target Landed Price’ is calculated according to the repricer module settings' information. In this case, the target landed price is $115.38, and the net margin is set to 10%, so we can calculate the Net profit after deducting the Amazon Commission and the total product cost from Target Landed Price, which ends up as $11.53. In other words, to fulfill the 10% margin requirement, StoreAutomator must sell this item for at least $115.38.
The repricer also shows a close competitor at the top, which has a sales price of $110.08. For this case, the repricer cannot lower the price further to go lower than the competitor, as lowering will violate the settings and cause a loss.
To become competitive again, a lower margin must be chosen for this product, or a way must be found to lower the shipping costs. Usually, it is not a good selling practice to lower the Channel’s profit margin, as it will be affecting all items in the channel. It is recommended to lower only this product’s margin.
This can be edited within the product editor in Channel > Channel Products by finding the product, clicking on the edit button towards the right, and clicking the ‘Repricer’ tab. These settings are the item’s individual settings, and lowering the margin here is the correct action. If you can afford it while editing the product, you can go to the ‘Costs’ tab and set the item’s shipping cost to a lower value.
These actions will decrease the minimum selling price and give more room to the repricer to stay competitive. Meanwhile, the repricer will set the item’s price according to the competitor, and if it is high enough, it might never have to lower its own price to the minimum price.
If you have some products that will go bad soon, you might want to utilize StoreAutomator’s ‘Liquidation Mode.’ In this mode, the repricer can go lower than the minimum target price and sell products at a loss. For more information, please refer to this article.