Earlier this year, Amazon announced a new addition to Seller Central – the Amazon Automate Pricing tool. This will allow all Professional seller accounts access to create pricing rules for their listings for free. To find out all about Amazon’s Automate Pricing tool, visit the Help page in Seller Central.
We’ve heard from several customers regarding this topic and what the difference is between Amazon’s product and SellerActive. In this post, we will address the top concerns of customers and breakdown the key differences between the capabilities of the two products.
Avoid the “race to the bottom”
When sellers are considering an automated repricing tool to use to better run their business, they often have the concern that it’s just, “a race to the bottom”. A strategy like this can destroy margins and result in lower profits.
Amazon’s Automate Pricing tool does a good job at lowering the price and winning the Buy Box, but it fails to adjust upwards, says one Amazon seller who’s been using the tool for 2 months.
Amazon will immediately price to your minimum, if there’s another seller on the same SKU. Here is how they explain it, “Your price will settle to the final level dictated by your rule and the other seller’s rule. For example, if you and the other seller both have the rule “Stay below the lowest price by $0.10”, your minimum price is $10.00, and the other seller’s minimum price is $10.50, rather than trigger numerous price changes in small increments, your price will go to $10.40, and the other seller’s price will go to $10.50.”
This scenario is not a good sign for sellers hoping to avoid the “race to the bottom”. SellerActive offers a more sophisticated repricing technology which allows you to set a default price that enables the repricer to price down to win the Buy Box, then price back up toward the default price. This technique will maximize margins instead of deplete margins. Additionally, sellers using SellerActive are able to exclude selling against specific competitors on Amazon, such as brand new sellers, which further allows them to pick their battles in terms of who they compete with for the Buy Box. Sellers can avoid low margins induced by Automate Pricing by taking advantage of this key feature within the SellerActive platform.
Spend time growing your business, not setting pricing rules
One by one, you can set up the rules for your SKUs. However, this is quite time consuming, especially for businesses that carry hundreds of SKUs. So if you only have a small amount of SKUs, the Amazon product may be suitable for you.
Also, when sellers change the price on an item, the Automate Pricing rules will pause or deactivate the listing from Automate Pricing. This has some sellers frustrated, who want the ability to manually adjust the price of their listing while retaining the current pricing rule applied to it.
Should you give pricing strategies to your competitor?
Amazon has a track record of identifying opportunities in the marketplace and diving in to get their share. Recently, Amazon has started shipping and delivering products themselves, as a supplement to their current relationships with UPS and USPS. Amazon also identified several opportunities in private labelled products, which has taken profits away from other sellers on Amazon.
Given Amazon’s track record of taking advantage of opportunities they’ve identified on their marketplace, sellers should think twice before handing over critical information on their product and business strategies.
Is support important to you?
Sellers who want to get started with a repricing strategy for their growing Amazon business should look toward a solution that offers expert support, especially if repricing is a newer strategy. Third party software solutions like SellerActive offer a complete implementation period to get customers comfortable with the software. Like any other tool, SellerActive is only as good as the ability of the business owner to understand their unique business goals, and how to use the tool to achieve those goals. We work closely with each customer to understand and exceed the goals provided.
After the implementation period has come and gone, each of our customers has access to our live in-house support team during extended business hours, Monday through Friday. Our support team members are experts in the e-commerce industry and strive to solve each inquiry as efficiently as possible.
All-in-one solution or single marketplace?
Are you looking to stick with your Amazon US store, or would you rather manage multiple marketplaces and channels to grow your business? Amazon Automate Pricing only manages pricing rules for Amazon.com. Many of our customers, and other Amazon sellers, like to take advantage of international marketplaces such as Amazon Canada, Mexico, Spain, Germany, etc. SellerActive integrates with these marketplaces, along with eBay, Jet and Rakuten which allows our customers to meet and exceed their business goals.
To learn more about Amazon’s Automate Pricing tool and how it compares to SellerActive, feel free to connect with one of our sales consultants – by phone at 800-545-7385 or email at sales@selleractive.com.
