So, you sell on Amazon. Perhaps you are thinking about trying. Maybe you've tried but haven't been met with much success. Welcome to the pro league. Amazon repricing might seem like a fabled silver bullet, a too good to be true solution to a universal challenge. In fact, a far better analogy would be the AK-47. It is the ubiquitous tool that any self respecting Marketplace seller relies upon for the day to day tightrope walk that is staying profitable and relevant amidst heavy competition.

What is an Amazon Repricing Tool?

Repricing is to Amazon sellers, as sniping is to ebay buyers. If you've ever waited for the last few seconds of an eBay auction to place your bid, you are an eBay sniper. If you've ever used an online sniping tool to do it for you, you've achieved the same result with less work and less room for error.

Amazon sellers are constantly changing the price on their listed items. Using a third party repricing tool is just a savvier way of getting the job done. It circumvents the tedious, multistep process of updating a listing. It saves chunks of time every time such an update is completed. It can be configured to update prices automatically, freeing up valuable time and working in real time to keep your listing at its most profitable.

Reprice, Who?? (An Introduction)

Laying in inventory, figuring out profit margins, and shipping off your shiny, new Thing-a-Majig to the waiting arms of your buyers is YOUR racket. Let's assume that you can do all of the above. Let's assume that you can do it well. Now comes the difficult part. Generating the maximum amount of sales.

What's the Big Deal?

Amazon is unique among other online retail outlets in that there is almost always just one listing per item. Often even wide variations (i.e. sizes, colors, versions) of a given item will appear on the same page. This makes it extremely easy for a potential customer to compare items quickly and effectively. It is also the reason why Amazon Product Reviews are a webwide quality standard.

However, this makes it difficult to stand out as a seller. There is no keyword to add to your title, no emphatic language telling people that you are the best seller in the world, and you can't describe your product any more enticingly than the next guy. The main tools you have are price, seller rating, and, the unicorn of Amazon sales, the Buy Box (see below).

Manipulating these tools to your advantage is going to be your biggest challenge. Maintaining good seller rating levels takes time and a concerted effort to keep customers happy (and is, of course, YOUR job). Price is a delicate tug of war between staying competitive and keeping profits up. Too high and nobody will buy, too low and you aren't covering your cost per item.

The Buy Box

The Buy Box is, simply, the box on the product page where customers can click to purchase the item. Although there can be many sellers for each item, only one appears at a given time in the Buy Box. This gives an enormous advantage to the featured seller, as most customers don't bother to click through to the page that lists all of the sellers.

The algorithm used by Amazon to determine who gets featured is both complex and unknown. What is known, is that it is determined by factors that ensure the best buying experience for the customer. This includes, among other things, shipping speed, percentage of returns, customer ratings and, of course, price.

What's the Bottom Line?

Sellers must constantly change their price in an effort to be the most enticing option on the list of sellers. This will convince both a prospective buyer scanning the list of sellers and the folks at Amazon choosing who will "win" the Buy Box.

An Amazon repricing tools allows every seller the opportunity to compete most aggressively within his/her operational parameters. The tool imports the information from the seller's account and updates its listings quickly with minimal user input. Over time a seller can configure the tool to change the price automatically. This results in more sales, higher profits, and significantly more time to focus on growing other areas of the company.