If you’re selling on Amazon and you’re competing with other sellers on the same listing, it’s inevitable you’ll run into a situation where you need to reprice your product to remain competitive.
Fortunately, there are only a handful of “repricing scenarios” you’ll encounter. I’m going to outline each one in detail, and explain the different strategies I’ve used that have worked for me, so you’ll be armed with the right knowledge when you encounter them and need to reprice your products.
First, let’s identify the various repricing scenarios you’ll encounter. They include:
- You currently have the Buy Box
- Amazon has the Buy Box
- Another FBA seller has the Buy Box
- FBM seller has the Buy Box
- Used offer has the Buy Box
- There is no Buy Box
Second, you’ll need a tool to properly analyze each scenario and make the best decision: Keepa. Keepa shows you a product’s sales rank history, price history, and a ton of other useful information.
*** If you need an explanation of why Keepa is so useful and necessary, check out this post. ***
Lastly, before I get into each specific repricing scenario, I want to describe in general what I mean when I use the term repricing, and the general process of repricing.
Repricing Process
When I use the term repricing, I mean changing the price of a product in Seller Central and the resulting change of your price on the customer-facing Amazon.com page.
While this is a straight-forward concept, there are a few specific things to know when repricing products:
- It takes time for a price change made in Seller Central to be reflected on Amazon.com, usually 10 to 15 minutes.
- You can choose to manually change your products’ prices or you can automatically reprice using Amazon’s repricing tool or a paid repricing tool. I recommend using Amazon’s free tool for automated repricing until you need more sophisticated functionality provided by the paid tools.
- When you change the price of a product, it’s possible that competing sellers’ prices will change in reaction to your price change.
- How you react to your competitor’s price changes is something you have to think about when you decide to start repricing for specific purposes, like winning the Buy Box, maximizing profitability or sales velocity, etc.
- To intelligently reprice your products, meaning you have both a specific strategy behind your repricing along with data about product demand and price history to guide your decisions, you’ll need to use a tool like Keepa. If you don’t know anything about Keepa, read this first so you know why using Keepa is so important when selling on Amazon.
Now that you know what I mean when I say “repricing”, let’s talk about each scenario I listed above.
You Have the Buy Box
You may think this is the easiest scenario to handle—just do nothing! However, even if you have the Buy Box, you should examine certain factors to make sure you’re maximizing your profitability and sales velocity.
First, look at how many other sellers are on the listing competing with you, and examine the prices they have set. If they’re all set higher than yours, you can likely raise your price and still keep the Buy Box.
This is also a good time to check your competitors’ stock levels, because you may be more or less aggressive with your pricing depending on how deeply stocked your competitors are.
With the help of the Keepa browser extension, you can see their stock levels in the pop-up window on the right of the product page, outlined in red boxes in the example below.
If you find that your competitors all have low stock, say less than 10 units each, you may want to raise your price above theirs. That way, when they stock out (which will be soon based on their low stock), you’ll sell your price higher and make more profit per sale.
However, if you find one or more of your competitors are deeply stocked, like the seller in the example above with 98,412 (!) units, you’ll want to stay competitive with their price so you maintain a healthy sell-through rate.
Remember, even if you have the Buy Box, there are changes you can make to potentially increase your profits or sell-through.
Amazon Has the Buy Box
This is both the easiest, and hardest, place to find yourself, because you’re competing with Amazon directly. It’s the easiest because there is almost always only one thing to do, namely lower your price below theirs, and the hardest, because no one competes as hard for the Buy Box as Amazon!
First, know that when Amazon has the Buy Box, they almost never share it with FBA sellers. This is important to know because the only way you can typically take the Buy Box from Amazon is by setting your price below their price.
I put “almost never” and “typically” in italics above because while I have seen scenarios where Amazon shares the Buy Box with FBA sellers, it’s rare, probably only 1%-2% of listings I’ve ever seen.
The other thing to watch for is Amazon is hyper-competitive in maintaining their offer in the Buy Box. Amazon is willing to lower their price to almost any level to keep their Buy Box exposure. Remember, Amazon doesn’t need to make a profit on any single product, and I’ve seen them set money-losing prices for years just to keep the Buy Box. You can’t, and don’t, want to compete with that!
I’m even aware of many sellers that have rules in place about not buying products to resell that Amazon sells, because the aggressive, hyper-competitive pricing by Amazon is something they don’t want to deal with.
Given all of the above, if you’re selling a product head-to-head with Amazon and you need to get the Buy Box, set your price below theirs, wait 15 minutes, and re-check the product page. Sometimes, Amazon will not follow you down in pricing, and sometimes they will match your price, again and again and again. Frustratingly, the only move you can usually make is to keep lowering your price until Amazon stops matching your price.
One way to avoid competing with Amazon is to know beforehand if Amazon has sold the product in the past. You can easily see this information in a Keepa chart, designated by an orange zone in the chart.
In the example below, Amazon has been a seller of this product for the entire past year, so you may not want to buy it because you’ll be competing directly with Amazon when trying to sell it.
Another FBA Seller Has the Buy Box
This is probably the most likely scenario you’ll encounter if you resell products from distributors and wholesalers like I do. You’ve got several repricing options depending on whether you want to maximize your sales velocity, your profitability, or find a balance between both.
The first thing to know is that unlike competing against Amazon, FBA sellers typically share the Buy Box, meaning offers from competing FBA sellers rotate through the Buy Box over time. This usually only happens, though, if FBA sellers set their offer price equal to other FBA sellers.
This sets up the most typical, and frustrating, re-pricing situation you’ll face: where a competing FBA seller sets their price a penny below yours, usually with the help of an automated re-pricing tool, and you need to decide how to respond.
First, you need to know what your break-even price is, so you don’t set your price below that level. It’s simple to figure out what the break-even price is: subtract the price you paid for the product from the sale price, then subtract the Amazon fee, then subtract any shipping and/or advertising fees, and as long as the result is above zero, you’re still making a profit.
| Product Price | $ 20.00 |
| Product Cost | $ 7.00 |
| Amazon Fee | $ 7.50 |
| Shipping Cost | $ 0.20 |
| Profit | $ 5.30 |
| Break-Even Price | $ 14.70 |
There are situations where you may want to sell below your break-even price, but those are usually special situations, like where you may want to liquidate low-margin product to avoid storage fees.
When repricing against competing FBA sellers, also be sure to examine how many competing sellers there are and what prices they’ve set. You’ll also need to look at their stock levels to see how soon they will run out of stock.
As a general rule, I MATCH other FBA sellers’ prices. I find most competing sellers don’t follow suit, however, and insist on using automated tools to constantly lower their price below mine. In this situation, I push their price as low as I can, and pin them to their price floor, forcing them to sell at minimally profitable prices. Once they run out of stock, I raise my price back up so I can make a reasonable profit.
Sometimes I have to go through this cycle over and over again, lowering and raising my prices to flush out competitors to maintain my profit margin. This approach takes a lot of time and effort, but to me it’s worth the time and effort, because why else am I selling things online if not to make a reasonable profit on what I sell?
Before moving to the next repricing scenario, I’ll take the opportunity to plead with anyone reading this to please MATCH your fellow FBA seller’s prices. Your offer will get rotated into the Buy Box eventually, so there is no need to undercut your competitors’ prices, because their only recourse if they want to keep Buy Box exposure is to match your lower price. This sets up a “race to the bottom” situation, where each seller is forced to keep lowering their price in response to another seller repeatedly setting their price below everyone else’s. In this situation, all FBA sellers suffer! Please, please don’t constantly lower your price a penny below the FBA seller with the Buy Box!
FBM Seller Has the Buy Box
While Amazon prioritizes FBA sellers when it comes to Buy Box exposure, it is possible for FBM sellers to get the Buy Box. The two most common scenarios I’ve found where FBM sellers get the Buy Box are:
- There are no FBA sellers for this product
- The FBA offer prices are much higher than the FBM offer price
Unfortunately for FBM sellers, it’s very easy to take the Buy Box from them. I’ve found that you can set your FBA price just less than $2 higher than the FBM Buy Box price, and your offer will replace theirs in the Buy Box.
For example, if the FBM seller’s Buy Box price is $16.95, I set my FBA price to $18.85, and I almost always take the Buy Box from them.
There is another less likely situation that can happen when an FBM seller has the Buy Box, which is when Amazon creates a small grey box below the Buy Box that says “Get it faster”, and highlights an FBA offer.
In the example below, a product I sell has an FBM seller in the Buy Box, but my offer, with the higher price of $41.43, is in the grey box below the Buy Box.
For this particular product, I’m happy letting the FBM seller keep the Buy Box, because I don’t mind trading lower sales velocity for increased profit per sale.
Used Offer Has the Buy Box
This is a less-frequently encountered scenario, usually occurring when there are either:
- No “New” offers
- “New” offers are priced above the List price
- “New” offers are priced above what Amazon calls the “Competitive” price
No “New” Offers
The first instance is somewhat self-explanatory, because if there are no “New” offers, Amazon can only put a “Used” offer in the Buy Box because there aren’t any other offers!
“New” Offers Priced Above the List Price
In the second scenario, if “New” offers are above the List price, but the “Used” offers are below the List price, Amazon may reward the Buy Box to the “Used” offer.
You can check the List price for a product using two different methods. First, by clicking the “Edit” button on the Inventory page of Seller Central you can find the list price field several fields below your offer price field, as shown in the example below.
The second method to find a product’s list price is with the Keepa browser plugin. The Keepa chart displayed for a product on Amazon.com has several tabs across the top, and one of them is “Data” (like the red box below).
Click on that tab, and two vertical tables will load. The right-most table contains the List price, near the bottom of the table. See below for an example.
No matter how you find the List price, if you discover the List price is below your price, try lowering your price to below the List price, and your offer should replace the “Used” offer in the Buy Box.
“New” Offers Priced Above the “Competitive” Price
The Competitive price scenario is similar to the List price scenario. Amazon defines a “Competitive price” as a price that is less than or equal to the lowest price for a product set by major retailers outside Amazon.
There are all sorts of problems with the idea of a price set by other major retailers as being “competitive”, but it’s something we have to deal with as Amazon sellers, so let’s talk about what to do in this situation.
Sometimes you’ll know you don’t have a “competitive” price set because you’ll have a price alert in your Seller Central inventory page that looks like this:
If you click on this, you’ll be taken to a screen where Amazon shows you what price they think you should be using. Sometimes this price makes sense, but sometimes not. Either way, just know you likely won’t get the Buy Box without setting your price equal to or lower than the price Amazon is recommending.
In the example below, you can see Amazon wants me to set a price of $1.02, even though their fulfillment fee is $3.89, making the price of $1.02 a money-losing scenario for sure!
In this instance, I usually let some time go by to see if the “competitive” price changes. Since there is no way for me to make a profit at $1.02, I have no incentive to lower my price to what they are recommending.
There is No Buy Box
This situation is similar to when a Used offer has the Buy Box. It arises when all sellers on a listing are priced above Amazon’s “Competitive” price or the List price.
When I see this situation, I determine the List price using one of the two methods explained above, and set my price below that, as long as that price is still profitable.
However, some products will sell just fine even without a Buy Box, so don’t lower your price just to have a Buy Box show up. If you’re getting regular sales, it’s fine to just leave your price as it is.
Your Offer Doesn’t Appear at All
Even though this isn’t exactly a repricing scenario, let’s talk about it because it’s a fairly common occurrence.
Sometimes, you’ll think your product should be showing up on the Amazon.com page as available for sale, but it isn’t. Don’t panic! There is almost always a good reason for this. Let’s look at what could be going on.
The first thing to do is check your inventory for the product to make you’re in stock and Amazon hasn’t disabled your listing for any reason. You’ll know if your offer is disabled because you’ll see this next to the product in the Inventory page of Seller Central:
If you see this, click on the “Inactive (Blocked) link and it will take to you another page showing what Amazon wants you to fix before your offer will show up on Amazon.com
Also, if you’ve recently sent stock to Amazon, remember it takes time for Amazon to receive your product and move it around the country to various warehouses. Don’t worry if it takes a week or more between Amazon receiving your stock and it being available for sale, because that’s usually the amount of time it takes for Amazon to fully receive shipments.
Wrapping It Up
Now that I’ve shown you all the repricing scenarios you’re likely to encounter as an Amazon seller, you’re better equipped to handle each of them as you come across them in your own business. Remember, with the right data to guide your decisions, and the right strategy to maximize your profitability, sales velocity, or both, you’re on the right path to be successful in repricing your products.
Want to read about how my Amazon business has evolved since I started selling in 2015? See this post.
Want to see the tools I use in my Amazon business beyond Keepa? Check out this page.