In this video, we’ll review the different types of prices in our system and how they interact with Profit Protection settings. We’ll also make changes to these prices in our User Interface and in bulk using a file upload.
In this video
- Review of Profit Protection Settings
- Choosing Manual or Dynamic Price Boundaries
- Modifying Prices in the UI and in bulk via file upload
How to Choose a Pricing Structure
Marketplace Management offers a host of different ways to reprice your products on the various marketplaces. Each marketplace operates differently and Marketplace Management has built effective solutions to keep your prices competitive.
However, it is equally important to protect your margins while remaining competitive regardless of the marketplace. For this reason, we offer Profit Protection settings to help manage how low or high your pricing can go on a given channel.
Currently, we offer 5 different price fields that will help protect your profits:
- Manual Minimum Price
- Manual Maximum Price
- Dynamic Minimum Price
- Dynamic Maximum Price
- Preferred Price
Access Profit Protection Settings
To access your profit protection settings, navigate to Tools -> Pricing strategies and choose any marketplace/strategy combination. Every strategy we offer includes profit protection settings.
How to Select Profit Protection Settings
For this example, I’ll create an Algorithm strategy and click next to land in our profit protection settings. Your first option is to choose a Pricing fallback strategy. These options kick in when there are insufficient number of qualified competitors available to price against, such as when Amazon removes the Buy Box and you are using a specific Buy Box strategy.
You have one of three options to choose from:
- “None”, where we leave you price as is;
- “Preferred Pricing”, where we will fallback to the specified price you have uploaded into the Preferred price field; or
- “Pricing Strategy” where our pricing engine will switch to a secondary strategy you have created.
The next settings to choose from are our manual or dynamic minimum/maximum pricing.
Manual Minimum/Maximum Price
Our Manual Minimum/Maximum price allows you to choose an exact price value that will restrict our system from pricing above or below. If you were to change a price outside of these boundaries, whether accidentally or intentionally, our system will restrict this action so that you can remain secure in knowing your prices are within a safe boundary.
Our Dynamic Minimum/Maximum option allows our system to calculate your price boundaries using a specific formula that you determine. The dynamic boundaries can be calculated using Cost, Cost + fees, MAP Price or Retail Price. If you choose to use our dynamic feature and select cost + fees for example, a modification to the product cost and/or the fees we import from Amazon would change the minimum/maximum price in dynamic fashion.
Additionally, we offer an “Optional Modifier” that allows you to choose a custom dollar or percentage value that can increase or decrease the manual or dynamic price by a certain amount.
After making your Profit Protection selections and creating your pricing strategy the next step is to make changes to your Manual Minimum/Maximum prices or the values driving your Dynamic Minimum/Maximum Prices. You have two options of accomplishing this task, either in the Listing Workspace or in bulk via a file upload.
Changing Prices via Workspaces
For changing prices in the User Interface, navigate to Workspaces -> Listings. Next, make sure that your columns are displaying the relevant minimum/maximum and preferred price headers. To accomplish this, click on the column chooser tile next the search bar in the upper right-hand corner and drag and drop any missing columns into the grid.
If this is your first time viewing these price columns you will immediately notice that your manual minimum and preferred prices are already set and will match the current “Price” we pulled in from each marketplace. This is a safety net feature in case you were to take the system live before structuring these prices yourself.
To modify a price field, simply click into any of the price fields, make your change and either push “Enter” on your keyboard or click back outside of the field you recently edited, and your change will be saved.
You will also notice a “Pricing Strategy” column in the grid and this field is used to assign your pricing strategies to the listings of your choice.
Changing Prices Using Bulk Upload
If you would rather update these price fields in bulk using an excel spreadsheet, navigate over to Tools -> File upload, and download the inventory template from the dropdown options.
This file will give you a coversheet of different inventory actions that can be used for a variety of scenarios. The most common action is “Modify”, and we’ll be using this action for making price changes. The first three columns, Inventory Action, Site, and SellerSKU are required to be filled in when uploading this template. Otherwise, you are free to delete any columns that do not pertain to the modifications you want to make in our system. For this example, I’ll be deleting everything but the pricing columns.
At this point, go ahead and insert your SKUs and the price values you are modifying. A quick way to find a list of your product SKUs is to export from either the listings or product workspaces. When complete, navigate to the File Uploads page and upload your inventory file for our system to store the changes you are making.