So, in Day Four we said you’d already done the hard bit. And yes, for most sellers sourcing is just that….but selling your goods at the right price without the right approach could make achieving consistent profits a struggle.
You can manage your inventory in Seller Central, in the Manage Inventory screen, with various filters and drop downs to see what you have in stock.
It is limited in what it offers in terms of managing your pricing to make sales, and profit, though.
The Seller App is a quick and easy way to access your account, view your competition, and change your pricing. For some this will be enough if they have little competition, or at least dormant competition, on their listings.
This is rare though and most sellers have employed repricers to manage their pricing and, in some cases, have made some excellent profits as a result.
The dynamic nature of the Amazon marketplace means prices change frequently so it is vital you can stay competitive.
Today we’ll delve into the options sellers have for pricing, and help you decide how to manage yours to make the most profit.
Manual Pricing – Using Amazon To Price Your Inventory
It happens to every seller, probably every day. You’ve listed a product having analysed it to death and worked out you’re going to get a nice healthy profit, even if the price dips a bit…..but it dips a LOT.
There are a couple of ways to change the price of your products on Seller Central, though obviously take care to know your profit margins and fees when you do!
Following the price down to chase a sale can be a dangerous habit to get into, and isn’t sustainable.
If you have been using BuyBotPro to analyse your deal, you can use it to assess how it will perform at different selling prices. Manually inputting different prices or, like here, using its ROI analysis to understand what difference a change might make.
Without a deal analyser you will still need to know, at the very least, your break-even prices.
Of course, you may find yourself in a position to increase your price too….happy days! You still need to be sure you are competitive though, and within the fair pricing policy, and you’d use the same tools to change your prices.
Your first port of call will be in Manage Inventory and entering, and saving, your new price.
Here Amazon will display the low price for each listing too, but it won’t show if it is an FBA or MF seller.
Using BuyBotPro, or at least the listing’s Amazon page, you can see who you are competing with. In the case of the former, you’ll get a bit more than a list of sellers and their prices, but either way you’ll be able to decide who you want to compete with.
You can also use the Seller App, which is a little easier to see your competition and then price your product. In the listing page you can see the competition and change your price in a couple of clicks.
Deciding what price is the most important decision when manually pricing.
On listings with lots of sellers, and often those with only a few, changing a price can trigger other sellers to change theirs. This makes manually pricing tricky….and time consuming!
Chasing the low price not only digs into your profit, but also affects the integrity of the listing. As sellers “race to the bottom”, the less likely it will be to recover to a healthy and profitable price.
Patience is often required on listings….analysing a listing properly will often prove its price will bounce back.
Using historic analysis, you could easily spot periods of increased sellers and lower price, and equally prices rising again when sellers drop off. This is usually the case when an item is put on sale at regular intervals by a major retailer – more sellers buy, sell out and those who have held their price can profit later.
It goes for Amazon selling on a listing too. If you have the historical data for a listing, you can find patterns and be able to make better decisions on how you price a product….and set some realistic expectations.
Amazon sell on this listing, but patience will see the selling price increase significantly when they drop off.
Holding may not always be possible for you in your strategy - you may need the cashflow, perhaps you’ve just picked up a bad deal or it’s an old listing and you want to exit – so you will need to manage your pricing as it shifts on the listing.
Repricing manually is time consuming, though, and not particularly effective.
Nowadays, most competing sellers use automated repricers. Manual repricing is rare for Online Arbitrage sellers as they will invariably have dozens, if not hundreds, of listings active.
As sellers have sold more, and Online Arbitrage has become a more professional business, automated repricers have become the norm.
What Is A Repricer And Why Do You Need One?
The clue is in the name, but a repricer will change the prices of your listings automatically….dependant on the rules a seller gives it. Millions of prices change every day on Amazon so, if you want the Buy Box, it’s important to keep up!
Of course, getting the Buy Box isn’t always the goal, but nowadays nearly all sellers use a repricer, whatever their objective.
A good repricer will run 24/7 without any input from the seller, and a great one will make you sales AND profit.
Amazon have a repricer within Seller Central and it’s free if you have the Professional plan. You can access it from the Pricing dropdown, and they call it Automated Pricing.
It is limited to reacting to the Buy Box, whether it is above, below or matching it and can be activated on any of your listings. It is free, and can be accessed easily, but serious sellers don’t use it….
….remember Amazon’s #1 priority? That’s right, the customer. They want the customer to get the best price.
Like all repricers you can set your minimum and maximum price, but allowing Amazon to control your prices will very likely see them go straight to the bottom. If prices are low on Amazon, they feel they are more likely to have that customer back again, and again, and again….
So, what’s the alternative, and why do sellers need a repricer?
Manual Repricing
- Free
- You control your prices
- Can be done from Seller Central and the Seller App
Automated Repricing
- Time Saving
- Quicker to react to price changes
- Manage multiple listings in one place
- Likely to create more sales
- Easier to avoid pricing errors
Not all repricers are built the same, but they all manage your prices in one way or another and will mean more time to spend on the other parts of your business.
Not only will you save time, but a repricer will very likely make you far more sales than you will manually pricing.
How, you ask. Well, it will react to the competing sellers when they, or their repricer, change their prices. You will usually be able to set up some rules for it to follow, so you will need to set it up carefully to fit with your strategy.
When you see listings with sales prices like this, there are repricers at work. The price will have dropped from the “pack” with one seller making the move, and repricers have followed them down. (Image from BuyBotPro)
If you want quick sales and potentially lose profit margin, then you will be able to instruct it to chase the low price. If you are happy to be patient, then you may well be able to program some repricers to avoid tanking the price, or at least be able set a higher low price and change it when the price starts to recover.
Choosing the right one will require some understanding of what it will do….and how.
Most aren’t a lot more sophisticated than Amazon’s Automated Pricing, though may make a run for the low price a little less quickly.
Repricing shouldn’t be like that though….a repricer should manage prices, not simply drop them.
Getting A Repricer That Will Make More Profit
Managing prices means just that, making the right decisions in multiple situations to create a desirable outcome. Think of the great managers you’ve had – or even how you may have managed effectively – it’s not just about making the easy decision. They make the right decision and make it look easy.
A great repricer will take your listing, look at all the factors affecting the pricing, and make a measured decision on the price it sets to get the desired outcome.
Not all repricers can do that, and even fewer will work in a manner to make sellers more profit.
The focus is usually on making sales which, for a lot of listings, means dropping the price….resulting in losing profit.
Seeing the prices on a listing drop can be disheartening as your hard work sourcing profitable deals can look wasted. Looking at listings as a living, moving entity will help though.
There are lots of reasons prices may drop, and sometimes quickly, so remember it doesn’t mean yours have to too.
Any of these reasons could cause this:
- A competing seller may have sourced cheaper than you – different supplier, voucher codes, store credit etc.
- New sellers often misunderstand fees and miscalculate margins
- A seller may be dumping some old or remaining stock to release cashflow and/or move off the listing
- Different sellers have different profit expectations
- Some sellers prefer a lower profit, high volume strategy so price low
- Most repricers, including Amazon’s, will largely chase the low price and drag the listing price down
Spending time worrying about why other sellers might drop the price, however significantly, is wasted time. This is business, and emotion needs to be removed from your decision-making as much as possible. With the right repricer, tanking prices won’t make the impact on your success you think it will.
Repricers will all promise, and often deliver, sales. Few focus on making profit AND sales.
It’s not easy to achieve both. Having a repricer that does more than follow your instructions, or has just a few rudimentary strategies, will give you a better chance to retain your profit margins.
The sellers at the top of this listing are likely making some healthy sales, but without profit. A small change, or tiny miscalculation of fees, and it’ll be a loss-maker.
The only way repricers can react intelligently to what can be volatile pricing is with some clever A.I. that can watch and learn your listings.
Profit Protector Pro has built its own unique algorithms to maximise the ability of the A.I. it uses to focus on the KEY indicator….profit.
Manual, and most automated, repricing won’t manage to achieve both additional profit and sales. Neither can react as quickly as the A.I. in Profit Protector Pro, so often miss the opportunity on competitive listings.
More sales is great, but profitable sales are way better.
Strategies For Every Scenario
The standout reason Profit Protector Pro is chosen by sellers is the profit it generates through its strategies. It is flexible enough that there are rudimentary strategies available too, such as Match Buy Box, Penny Under Buy Box or Match Low price.
The pricing strategies that are successful in protecting and increasing profit are the ones driven by their unique algorithms.
A team of developers have designed them all in-house, and almost all resulting from requests and feedback from Amazon sellers, and the scenarios they find themselves in.
The list of strategy options is constantly growing, but they all have one focus and that is to retain or increase the profit of a user’s listing….whichever algorithmic strategy they employ. Sellers can choose a different strategy for any listing which, given every listing is completely unique, is invaluable.
What is a pricing strategy? With Profit Protector Pro you will essentially choose a strategy based on the balance between sales and profit.
You can ask it to be aggressive and compete for the Buy Box, or passive, whereby you’ll attain higher profit margins and pick up sales at a higher price.
This may seem implausible if you have already tried manual repricing, or even used another repricer. However, the Profit Protector Pro Facebook group is filled with users bragging about it. The A.I. is frequently known to steal sales at higher prices than the low price or Buy Box.
PPP includes these algorithmic strategies to make any pricing scenario a profit opportunity:
Keep this as a quick reference point on your wall, desk or even make it into mouse mat! Before long they’ll be familiar enough.
You can change your strategies on Profit Protector Pro as often as you like, but the longer you leave it to learn a listing, the more effective it will be for you.
There are more rudimentary, non-algorithmic strategies available too if you choose to focus in on a particular goal.
They don’t use the same A.I. though, so won’t be able to grab those sales quite as easily as the algorithmic ones.
Having an overall strategy for your business is key and working toward the criteria you will have set on BuyBotPro is still important for consistency. Using Profit Protector Pro, you can break your overall strategy down into ones specific to different types of listings.
This is the first step in becoming a business that can effectively manage a diverse inventory….a great way to grow your Online Arbitrage venture.
Profit Protector Pro Is As Easy As ABC
The website you manage your Profit Protector Pro account from is full of features and is an easy portal to manage your repricing from.
Before anything else you’ll need to integrate PPP into your Amazon Seller Account. Amazon and Profit Protector Pro have identifying keys that need to be connected so your inventory can be synced.
Profit Protector Pro is set up to make your changes instantly so, once connected, Amazon will action their instructions as if you were doing so manually.
For a walkthrough of how to connect your account with PPP there’s an easy walkthrough here.
It can take a few hours to sync your entire inventory if you have a lot of different ASINs, but once it is done, you’re set. From there on in your repricing instructions get sent instantly to Amazon.
With Profit Protector Pro, like all software, you need to set it up to work for your business and look how you want it to.
You’ll know when products are connected as you’ll likely see them displayed like this:
While Amazon is doing its thing there is some admin to do, so head over to the Account dropdown and select My Account.
Here, check your details are correct, or enter them, and then select the marketplaces you will be selling in. You aren’t committing to sell in them, just letting PPP know you’d like to see the data from the ones you choose. Make sure you choose your main one though!
You can select a default strategy to make it easy to select the same strategy for all of your inventory, if you ever need to
How you view your inventory will probably depend on how many marketplaces you sell in, but also personal preference. There’s a tabbed or multi-view option, so have a play and find one that suits your eye, and business, best.
The tabbed view neatly hides marketplaces away but easy to view, and each ASIN takes up a little less screen space.
If you are active in different marketplaces seeing all of them in one place could be really appealing.
There are also a couple of great workflow options to choose from to setup BuyBotPro, for when you click through to a listing from Profit Protector Pro – hover over the ‘?’ for more details.
PPP also offer what, for some, is a very powerful feature to help raise those prices, especially on listings with a handful of competing sellers. Sleep Mode gives you the option to bump all your prices to the max overnight (or whichever time period you select).
Raising your prices in the quiet period overnight can prompt other sellers, and their repricers, to bring theirs up too!
When Profit Protector Pro turns back on in the morning it gets back to repricing, but potentially tackling higher prices than the day before. It’s definitely worth having an experiment with.
In the Min & Max Automation page you can set up some automatic pricing rules when you add products to your inventory. This is particularly useful if you are a demon sourcer and add lots of different products in a sourcing session.
Setting up your min’s & max’s to automate will mean, in one click on PPP, it will calculate them for you.
This is particularly useful if you have set criteria you want to price to. Enter what you consider your typical requirements, and use this feature when you feel it is appropriate for a listing.
If you are super strict on what you will accept, then there is button to apply it to your entire inventory.
One thing to be wary of when setting your maximum price, whether automating or manually choosing them, is not to set them too high. Amazon have a fair pricing policy and will suspend a listing if it is priced what they deem as too high, so be realistic.
Profit Protector Pro will also work out your Break Even for products you enter the Buy Price for.
In the Break Even Settings, using the information you will have entered into BuyBotPro when you set it up, you can have it apply to your listings in PPP. Break even is obviously a key number to help you manage your individual items, so filling out this page to stay accurate is advised.
If you have any questions while setting up have a jump onto the Facebook group, or email the support team at info@ProfitProtectorPro.com.
Deciding Your Own Fate On PPP
As you gain confidence with Profit Protector Pro you may find you have listings that require a more customised approach. There are regular features added as users provide feedback and ideas, and there are two that give those sellers who like to tinker a touch more control.
Now, one of the big advantages of automated repricing is avoiding mistakes easily made when manually pricing. The Custom Strategies feature allows for some semi-automated pricing, so your specific requirements but with a little buffer of protection when you set one up.
Setting up a Custom Strategy requires working through a wizard, ensuring you don’t accidentally misprice a product.
You can adopt any PPP strategy, set your own price or ROI, ignore different types of sellers and set various rules for your strategy to follow. Whether you want to apply a set timescale, or event that triggers a change, you can manage it here.
It’s probably for sellers who have used the algorithmic strategies for a while and familiar with how it works, but can be useful for the odd awkward listing.
Amongst the newer features to arrive in Profit Protector Pro is an Automation option.
Automation gives you a little more control than you get with Custom Strategies, in fact you can use any strategies you’ve created within your Automation.
Similarly, you can follow a wizard, or create a quick workflow, and devise various conditions for your strategy to react to.
Whether you want to go aggressive for a couple of days and return to a more passive approach, or change the required ROI after selling a certain number, you can take a more hands-on approach without losing the benefits of an automated repricer.
The vast majority of sellers just allow the A.I. to do its thing and make them profit as they sleep, work and play.
In fact, Profit Protector Pro will calculate the profit it has made you above the Buy Box price with the Boost display.
Whilst if you source effectively and watch over your pricing carefully you can make profit manually repricing, it is uncommon to make sales above the Buy Box.
More than 80% of all sales on Amazon are made through it….considering not all listings have a Buy Box that is a stark statistic.
Without the power of algorithmic strategies, it is very rare to get the Buy Box without being in the right place at exactly the right time.
Next time you are manually repricing have a look what happens on a listing with several sellers when you move the price down…the ones that follow you to the bottom are almost certainly using a repricer.
The ones that don’t are probably using Profit Protector Pro.
Profit Protector Pro: Extensions And Integrations
There are a few alternative ways to access Profit Protector Pro than the website, and a couple of them could really streamline your workflow.
You can access Profit Protector Pro straight from any Amazon product page….a much more powerful feature than it sounds!
With the main website you need to wait for Amazon before you can set repricing rules for a new product you are adding to your inventory. With the Chrome extension you can do it at the time you source it.
You don’t even need to buy it, but you can set it up ready in PPP if you do so it starts making profit from the moment it is live.
All the functions you need for a new listing can be entered without needing to go to the PPP web page. In seconds you’ll have set up your repricing and, in a lot of cases, you may never have to look at it again!
Find it in the Chrome Web Store, login when installed and it will pop up at the top of any Amazon listing.
If you value your browser’s real estate, then there is an integration with the same power if you use BuyBotPro.
The BuyBotPro panel shows up on every Amazon listing, and you may have spotted a Profit Protector Pro section. As with the Chrome extension you can box off your repricing settings at the time of sourcing.
The advantage of the BuyBotPro integration over the Chrome extension is that BBP is customisable. Move the different features up and down the panel and have the ones you need where you need them. So, if repricing is the main thing you do on BuyBotPro, stick it at the top!
Both will unquestionably speed up your new listing process….one less step to do when you are prepping and sending your stock into Amazon.
Profit Protector Pro is also the first repricer to have an app, anywhere. As with the extension and BuyBotPro integration it is fully functional so, not only do you not need to be on the PPP webpage to reprice, you don’t even need to be at your desk.
Everything is mobile nowadays, but only Profit Protector Pro have taken repricing mobile.
Adopting a repricer is a step nearly all sellers have taken as competition in Amazon has increased, and in the case of Profit Protector Pro users they haven’t looked back. The Amazon automated pricing feature no longer has the capability to keep you competitive, and the focus for many open market repricers is on making sales….not profit.
Profit Protector Pro has been developed by Amazon sellers after being frustrated with the one-dimensional approach of what was available. The developers, and owners, are active in the Facebook group and welcome feedback and ideas to make sellers workflows - and profits - better.
The proof is in the features PPP offers… most of them are by request from the Facebook group!
Even if you didn’t make more profit using a repricer, you would create a LOT more time to focus on your sourcing and analysing, or just have more coffee breaks!
You will make more profit, though. And Profit Protector Pro is the only one who puts it front and centre.
In Day Six you’ll find out about some scenarios we hope you never face, but also a couple of key factors that will contribute the most to growing your business.
- Ungating; accessing more categories and products
- Account Health; what it is and how to maintain it
- Suspensions; threats to your account and how to deal with them
In the meantime, get selling those ASINs as now you’ll be making more profit from them!