Why Amazon Allows Repricing?

As you may imagine the constant repricing of products take a toll on the servers of Amazon. In the same time the sellers who have a good repricing strategy gain an unfair advantage over the sellers who offer high quality services when it comes to customer experience and shipping speed. So just why do Amazon allow it?

The goal of Amazon is to offer a great customer experience and low prices are an important part of this. By making it possible for sellers to practice repricing, the prices will become more competitive, which increase the chances of a buyer ordering from Amazon instead of some other website. According to Amazon's algorithm, sellers should not sacrifice excellent customer experience and fast delivery time for lower prices; however price undeniably is the main factor in gaining more sales and the buy box status. This is why Amazon themselves have their own technology for repricing, which includes the Subscriptions API, Amazon MWS, Feeds API, and their automated system for detecting pricing errors. Surely if Amazon is repricing their own products you need to be doing it too!

How Amazon Repricers Work

The Subscriptions API was presented in July 2013 and it is meant to give notifications of the main events of the marketplace, such as price changes. For instance, if one of the 20 lowest price offers of a given product in a given state changes, you will receive a notification. This API contains important information such as Buy Box eligibility, FBA usage, and shipping time.

The Feed API makes it possible for the repricers to change the price or other important details of the products offered. You can make changes as often as you want through this API, but you should know that the details page will only be updated every 15 minutes. This means that there can be a price war behind the scenes: you get notifications of the changes, but they don't become visible just yet. After those 15 minutes the product page refreshes and the new price will be shown, along with the winner of the Buy Box.