Amazon Repricer Guide for Booksellers in 2024
Amazon Repricer Guide for Booksellers in 2024
You have done a great job sourcing books and you have listed them on Amazon. But you are getting a few sales even though the inventory has good enough traffic. No matter what price you change it to, other sellers adjust their prices every time you look at the listings. You mostly worry about your prices not being competitive with other offers. Does this resonate with you? Keep reading and you will find interesting tips about how you can manage the prices of your inventory with little to zero effort.
Hello, fellow resellers! This is Omer aka bookupcycle, I have sold over $10M worth of books on Amazon in almost a decade, and today I will guide you to make an informed decision about choosing an appropriate repricer and great pricing strategies to implement according to your goals.
What is repricer and what does it do?
Repricer is a software automation that adjusts your prices automatically based on some parameters and limitations you prefer. Think of like a virtual assistant that is available 24/7 at your disposal and checking your prices and comparing them with your competitor’s prices day and night. You probably would be okay to lower your price a few cents if you will get the sale. However, it would not make sense to lower your price to the point where you can no longer make any profit. How would you define the limitations? Let me introduce you to some concepts that would be used at most of the repricing softwares in the market.
Minimum and maximum prices (some companies call floor and ceiling prices): You determine a price range for your item and let your repricer know that you would only be okay to price your item between these two price points, minimum and maximum prices. No matter what the competition is, your prices will not be less than the minimum or more than the maximum price. You now figured the minimum and maximum prices but how is your repricer going to know what price to change it to at any certain time?
Match with the lowest “channel condition” by x dollars: Your repricer needs to detect when it is a good time for you to change your price. Also, it needs to determine a reference price to make a decision. Let’s say you are selling the book in Figure 1 as FBA used. You would probably want to match with the lowest fba used or used buy box by 1 cent and your price would be $18.22. Please check Figure 1 and Table 1 to understand this concept.
Figure 1: A screenshot from Bookzy Mobile App of an example book to demonstrate
Table 1: How repricer would react based on “match by” actions for the sample book on Figure 1
Ignore the sellers with x% rating or below: Some sellers might be very impatient and aggressive to sell their items especially the “just launched” or low feedback percentage sellers. It would not be wise to follow their prices as they tank. That is why most repricers can ignore these sellers.
If the target is Amazon: It would be reasonable to sell your items less than Amazon price by some dollar amount or percentage since Amazon has a huge advantage of getting most of the sales. For example, if you say drop my price by $1 if Amazon is on the listing(Assuming Amazon is selling for $20), your price would be $19. This feature also exists in most of the repricers.
Having different rules based on the sales volume: This is one of the most important “nice to have” features for booksellers. The reason is that more than 95% of our inventory is single copies as booksellers. If the book has a super low average sales rank like 5K and you have only one copy, it would not make sense to reprice it aggressively. Because this hypothetical book sells probably hundreds of copies every single day and you only have one copy, you might even consider matching with the lowest third to maximize your profit.
On the other hand, if you have a long tail book like 3M average sales rank and it has been sitting at the Amazon FC for over 9 months, you probably would want to get the next sale and reprice aggressively. Most of the repricers do not have this handy unique feature.
Considering other parameters like quantity, inventory age, buy box existence, buy box being on MF or FBA offer, gaps between the lowest two offers: This example rule determines what price to have after evaluating many parameters. Let’s say you are selling the book in “Figure 2” as in FBA used, you have only one copy and it has been only 30 days since you have listed. If you match with the buy box or lowest fba used, your price would be $9.81. However, you would make more profit if you wait for the lowest fba to sell considering the gap between lowest two fba offers and the 9K average sales rank. If you have a better approach with a more flexible rule like the one you see in “Figure 3”, you would sell the same hypothetical book for $12.49.
Figure 2: Example book for the rule in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Detailed ruleset as an example
Global payout limit: We have already discussed that your price would fluctuate between the minimum and maximum prices that you set up. However, how would you manage to add minimum or maximum prices to secure your profit on each of your inventory if you have hundreds, thousands even tens of thousands of listings? Or over hundreds of thousands of books like my business? It is not reasonable to have the same minimum prices across your listings either as each item would leave you a different amount of payout after the fees because they all have different dimensions and weight. If you do this A you will lose money on some of your sales or B you will have high minimum prices for some of your listings and will not get any sales.
Bookz Pro has introduced a new approach for this painful problem as you see in “Figure 4”. You set up the minimum desired payout amount and Bookz Pro calculates the price it corresponds to based on each of your items. You will never lose money even though you do not set up any minimum prices. Plus, you can gradually decrease the minimum payout you are willing to take as your inventory gets older which is a great practice to avoid long term storage fees and maintain a healthy “Sell-Through-Rate”.
Figure 2: Example book for the rule in Figure 3.
Conclusion
To sum up, having an automated repricing software is crucial no matter how many books you sell on Amazon. Automated solutions expedite the process of getting the return on your investment so that your business can grow faster. Bookz Pro’s repricer has all the features(and more) that I have mentioned above and also comes with other products like listing software, an analytics dashboard, and many unique tools to manage your inventory. Bookz Pro customer support can upload great templates of repricing rules. You just need to schedule a meeting and Bookz Pro will handle the rest.
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