A repricer you can explain to your accountant
The rules Depotely's repricer follows on bol.com and Amazon, the three edges you set per offer, and the mistakes it refuses to make, such as undercutting your own price.
· 3 min read
Repricers have a bad reputation, and the reputation is earned. Left alone, a naive one walks a price down to the floor every half hour and calls it winning. Depotely's repricer is built from a short list of rules, each of which you can read, change per offer and switch off. This article is that list.
The basic move
For every offer with the repricer on, Depotely looks at the cheapest competing offer on bol.com or Amazon and sets your price just below it, by the amount you chose. On bol.com that happens every thirty minutes, right after the competitor prices are refreshed; on Amazon on the same half-hour rhythm. Change a rule and the offer is re-checked within seconds instead of waiting for the next round.
The band
A price never leaves the band you set around a base price: so many percent below, so many percent above. A base price of 41.50 with a lower limit of 10 percent and an upper limit of 15 percent gives a band from 37.35 to 47.72. The competitor can go wherever they like; your price stays in that band.
Depotely refuses settings that could zero a price, such as a lower limit of 100 percent or a negative number. An offer without a base price copies its current price into it when you switch the repricer on, because a missing base price would quietly disable repricing.
The floor
Separately from the percentages there is an absolute floor per offer: never below this amount, whatever the band says. Your cost price is the usual choice. If the floor ends up above the ceiling of the band, the floor wins; the repricer would rather not sell than sell at a loss.
Three things it never does
- It never competes against you. Both bol.com's competing-offers list and Amazon's offer list include your own offer; Depotely drops it before picking a competitor. Without that, holding the buy box means the cheapest offer is yours and a careless repricer undercuts itself every round.
- It never lowers the price while you hold the buy box in every country you sell in, unless you switch that behaviour off. A competitor moving up is still followed.
- It never compares across conditions. A second-hand copy at half the price is not competition for a new one and does not drag it down.
When you are alone
With no competitor at all, the repricer leaves the price where it is. If you prefer, an option per offer sends it to the ceiling of the band instead. That option only acts once bol.com's seller list has actually been fetched; "not fetched yet" is never read as "nobody else sells it".
What you see afterwards
Every price the repricer sends is written to the listing in the same step, so the inventory table shows the new price immediately rather than at the next catalogue export. The repricer column shows the previous and the new price side by side, and the time of the last move. The price on the site, the buy-box price whoever holds it, sits next to your own, with the number of sellers behind it.
Defaults versus settings
Under Settings you keep three defaults: the lower limit, the upper limit and the undercut amount. They pre-fill the dialog for an offer that was never configured. They are not read by the repricer itself, so changing a default never moves an offer that is already being repriced; that offer keeps its own band.
Switching many offers at once
The list icon in the repricer column switches the repricer on for every offer on the page you are looking at. Offers that were never configured get your defaults around their current price; offers that already have settings keep them; an offer without a price is skipped.
Which plan
The repricer is part of Enterprise. Essential and Professional show the competitor prices and the buy-box owner in the table, so you can see what the repricer would be working with before you move up.