For many Amazon and eBay sellers, “repricing” is a dirty word. They consider it to be a “race to the bottom” where sellers discount themselves out of business in a futile competition for the lowest price. This is why having a strategy is an imperative when it comes to optimizing your marketplace pricing when it comes to increasing profitability.
But what if the “race to the bottom” is one of the biggest misconceptions among sellers? What if this misconception is, in fact, costing them significant profits?
StreetPricer is a price optimization tool for online retailers selling on Amazon and eBay. It evaluates the competition and your sales velocity, and then reprices your listings to maximize sales and profit.
StreetPricer uses an AI-driven solution to handle repricing in two marketplaces that are structured very differently: Amazon is product-driven, while eBay is listing-driven. Each marketplace has its own unique set of challenges for sellers and repricing tools, and needs features that are designed specifically for it. Let’s dive in and see how StreetPricer solves these problems.
Where did StreetPricer come from?
It’s important to understand that StreetPricer isn’t some new kid on the block. Founder Cardy Chung has been in the ecommerce business for nearly twenty years, having started selling automotive parts on eBay in 2004. This means that StreetPricer comes from a seller’s perspective, with a deep understanding of how marketplaces work and the challenges sellers face.
Early in his ecommerce career, Cardy became frustrated with the software tools available on the market, and created his own system to manage the business more efficiently.
Then in 2008, Cardy had an unfortunate encounter with a competitor who cloned all of his listings, which numbered around one thousand at the time, and set the prices one dollar lower. Sales took a nosedive as a result, and the whole enterprise started to look shaky.
Frustrated that a disreputable seller was driving him out of business, Cardy created the first version of his own repricing software to help fight back. It took a serious investment of time, and there was no guarantee that it would pay off, but once it was finally up and running the new system proved to be a success. The competitor was put on the back foot and without the resources to adjust their own prices on a continuous basis, Cardy’s sales quickly returned.
The new tool became a key part of Cardy’s success as an eBay seller, and he continued to refine it over many years. In 2017, after turning down many requests from fellow sellers to use the software, Cardy assembled a team and completely re-built the system to make it scalable for any number of users. StreetPricer was born.
Originally launched as an eBay-only repricer, StreetPricer now has the ability to reprice listings on Amazon as well.
What’s unique about StreetPricer?
There are many repricing software tools out there, with plenty of options for Amazon but just a few for eBay. Repricers that work with both Amazon and eBay, like StreetPricer, are as rare as hen’s teeth.
Why is it so unusual to find a repricing tool that works with both marketplaces? Well, it’s because they have fundamentally different structures.
Amazon is product-driven with a centrally-controlled catalog. This means that matching products is easy, but the way sellers are selected for the all-important Buy Box is not. It is driven by a complex algorithm, and decoding that is far from easy – it’s not just about price.
eBay, however, is listing-driven so every seller has their own unique product page. Despite multiple “structured data” initiatives it remains difficult to identify every matching product with 100% accuracy.
To solve this challenge, StreetPricer incorporates two separate AI engines on the same platform – one custom-built for Amazon, and the other for eBay. This unique setup allows StreetPricer to do native Amazon repricing with one side of its “brain”, and eBay repricing with the other.
StreetPricer also offers impressive repricing speed on Amazon. Built on the 2021 Amazon API architecture, it can respond to price changes in literally seconds. Similar high speeds are available for eBay. The software is also very intuitive and praised by users as simple to use, with the UX making even eBay’s difficult ecosystem look easy.
For sellers with listings on both Amazon and eBay, the convenience of controlling their repricing rules, ceiling prices, and floor prices all from one place is a considerable advantage.
How does StreetPricer work with Amazon?
When it comes to Amazon, StreetPricer offers competitor and velocity repricing algorithms as it does for eBay, but also has two features specific to the Amazon marketplace: the Buy Box Win/Loss Indicator and Profit Optimizer.
First is the Buy Box Win/Loss Indicator. Once you’ve won the Buy Box for a particular listing, this feature tracks it over time. It shows which of your SKUs have won the Buy Box in the last 7, 30, and 90 days; and which SKUs have lost the Buy Box in the last 7, 30, and 90 days.
This information gives sellers a crucial insight into how competitive their listings are and allows them to respond to market dynamics quickly.
The second key feature for Amazon sellers is Profit Optimizer. An AI-driven feature, Profit Optimizer does what it says on the tin. Once you have won the Buy Box, the software evaluates the marketplace and your competition, then gradually adjusts the price upwards to the highest it can be without losing the Buy Box.
This “set it and forget it” feature allows sellers to maximize their profit with smart optimizations that happen automatically.
How does StreetPricer work with eBay?
eBay is a listings-driven marketplace where many buyers have a bargain-hunting mentality, making repricing particularly difficult. There are often 20+ different sellers with the same item, and no central product catalog to match them all together. So, as an eBay seller, how do you identify which sellers are your real competitors and which ones should be ignored?
StreetPricer’s answer is a feature called Radar that isolates the real competition from the noise. It’s a two-stage process. First, it analyzes product listings and sellers to identify possible competitors as “suspects”. Then it figures out which are the most “competitive”. These are the listings that the tool evaluates to determine whether to raise or lower prices.
Many factors are taken into consideration as part of this process, including the brand, price point, keywords, item condition, product codes (UPC, EAN, MPC), and other parameters. As software that was purpose-built to work with eBay from day one, it’s fair to say that StreetPricer now has Radar down to a science.
eBay sellers also have a Velocity Based Repricing option. Unlike standard repricing, where prices are adjusted based on your competitors, velocity repricing is based on how fast your products are selling. You set the parameters then the system experiments to find the best combination of price and sales volume. Once that level is set, prices are automatically adjusted up or down to keep the sales velocity consistent.
Velocity Based Repricing is a sound strategy for brands or products that don’t have direct competition, such as private label sellers in categories like garden tools or health supplements.
Finally, StreetPricer’s eBay features can handle multiple product variations (both on your listings and your competitors’) and calculate shipping and sales tax for the most accurate comparison.
What kind of sellers benefit most from using StreetPricer?
Generally speaking, a paid repricing tool is best for commercial sellers (not those running a home-based business) with more than 200-300 SKUs. At this level, it takes too much time to monitor the marketplace and react to price changes manually, so an automated tool offers a clear advantage.
StreetPricer has customers with as few as 700 SKUs and as many as 220,000, but the average business using their solution is a midsize seller with about 5,500 SKUs. In terms of revenue, turning over about $5,000 per month seems to be the minimum for sellers to both need and afford StreetPricer to grow their business.
Sellers who have products listed on Amazon and/or eBay and other ecommerce platforms are also strong candidates to benefit from StreetPricer. This is because the software features data connectors that allow it to push price data to ecommerce platforms including BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify.
How do sellers get started with StreetPricer?
Getting started with StreetPricer is quite simple. Sellers can sign up on the website for a 14-day free trial.
It takes a short time to set up the service, depending on the number of SKUs. First, StreetPricer downloads the seller’s inventory from Amazon and/or eBay, so sellers do not have to populate product information themselves.
Then price rules, minimum prices, and maximum prices are set, and that’s it – the system is up and running. There’s no commitment or credit card required for the free trial.
Once a seller decides they want to use StreetPricer beyond the trial period, there are many plan levels available so sellers don’t have to pay for a SKU allowance that’s much larger than they need. These include:
- A free plan that covers up to 10 SKUs.
- A standard plan that covers 1000 SKUs for eBay or 2000 SKUs for Amazon, priced at $29 per month.
- Three higher-level plans with additional features and an allowance of up to 20,000 product SKUs.
- Five different enterprise plans with API access, enhanced customer support and allowances of 30,000 SKUs upwards.
Full information on the features and SKU allowances for different plan levels is available on the StreetPricer website.
What should sellers expect from working with StreetPricer?
StreetPricer prides itself on its customer service, based on the East Coast of the US and with fast response times for customers around the globe. Their product specialists have great knowledge of both Amazon and eBay. They understand repricing, and give advice to customers to maximize the benefits of using the software, as well as simply troubleshooting problems.
With four years as a commercial repricing solution, and many more as an in-house tool, StreetPricer was founded and is operated by former marketplace sellers. This gives the company a grounded perspective that helps them relate to customers on equal terms. They’ve been there, done that, and sold the t-shirt – so they are ideally placed to help you grow your business with the benefit of all their knowledge.
Finally, StreetPricer has never experienced a problem like the rare but very serious malfunctions seen with some other tools in the past. These have caused all product prices to drop to a penny. StreetPricer’s system incorporates a series of checks and balances explicitly designed to prevent such an incident from happening. It has earned the trust of over a thousand sellers from 40 different countries who rely on StreetPricer to set prices competitively while also maintaining profitability.
AI-powered repricing for both Amazon and eBay
StreetPricer’s repricing tool is unique in the market. It could be a real difference-maker for sellers with a lot of inventory to manage, particularly if they sell on both Amazon and eBay. Having one tool that handles both platforms, but with features that are built specifically for each one, is a clear benefit for sellers. In the future, StreetPricer will be expanding to Walmart, moving it to an even rarer level of online marketplace support.
Repricing is not simply a “race to the bottom”, when it’s automated using a tool that respects floor prices and maximizes profits whenever it can, rather than just winning sales at any cost.
StreetPricer provides high-speed repricing, reacting to price changes before competitors take your sales. It has innovative features like the Buy Box Win/Loss Indicator for Amazon, and the competitor-locating Radar for eBay, and provides a great user experience instead of treating UX as an afterthought.
With a 14-day trial and “free-forever” repricing for up to 10 SKUs, there’s nothing to lose from giving StreetPricer a test drive.
Get started with StreetPricer today.
This article was sponsored by StreetPricer.
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