When using the Amazon Repricer in Channable, there are several Repricer strategies possible. There are currently two strategies to do this: Buy Box Targeting and Competitor Targeting. In this article, we explain how the Competitor Targeting strategy works. If you want to read more general information about the Repricer first, go to this article. If you want to know how to configure the Repricer, read this article first.
Shared Buy Boxes
Amazon has shared buy boxes, meaning there can be multiple buy box winners per product. Which of those winners is shown in the buy box at Amazon is decided by factors that Amazon has control over. For example, being logged in as an Amazon Prime user or not. We don’t know the exact factors. This means that even if the tool shows that a product has the buy box, it could happen that you don’t see it in the buy box on Amazon. The reason for this could be that the buy box is shared with another product.
Important: Not every offer is eligible to win the buy box. You can check in your seller account whether or not is eligible to win the buy box. See this Amazon article for an explanation.
The Competitor Targeting strategy
The Competitor Targeting strategy does not take the status of the offer into consideration when Repricing. That means it does not look at whether or not the product has the buy box. Instead, it focuses on undercutting the competition with a certain amount, an amount that you set up yourself. This can be a worthwhile strategy if you want to be more specific with regards to which competitors you want to compete with. Mostly, the Competitor Targeting strategy in Channable can be seen as the manual counterpart of Repricing, compared to the automatic Buy-Box Targeting strategy.
For example, a few scenarios in which this strategy would be useful are:
- When you know that you don’t want to compete with sellers that have a low seller rating, or that have a high delivery time. You will most likely win the buy box with a higher price anyway.
- When you don’t want to start a price war.
- When you know that you will win the buy-box on merits other than price.
If you choose the Competitor Targeting strategy, Channable's Repricer will do the following (see image below for an example):
- The Repricer filters out the competitors that have been excluded in the ‘Do not compete with’ settings of the Repricer rules.
- The Repricer filters out the competitors that fall below a set seller rating threshold (for example; new sellers have a low seller rating and you don’t want to compete with them).
- The Repricer filters out the competitors that have a delivery time of >x days (for example when you don’t want to compete with sellers that are very cheap, but really slow).
- The Repricer will set the amount with which it undercuts your price based on the lowest offer and the undercut distance you set up.
The competitor strategy provides more flexibility to the user over the Buy-Box Targeting strategy. All of the above four points can be configured to your preferences in the Repricer rules. Keep in mind that the Repricer, with this strategy, will not keep lowering the price until you get the buy box. If you want this to happen, you should choose the Buy-Box Targeting strategy. With the Competitor Targeting strategy, we will undercut your competitors with the price amount you have set up, and we will only undercut once. If something changes (for example, the competitor with the lowest price offer stops selling the product), we will check and reprice again according to the same settings.
Setting Shipping price
To determine the ‘actual price’ of a product, Channable needs to take this shipping price into account. Because the shipping costs are set up in your Amazon seller account, we want you to indicate the shipping price in the repricer rules. If you don’t select a field, we assume shipping price = 0. This is especially important for the competitor targeting strategy, as illustrated by the example below.
Example
The Amazon terminology: 1. Listing price = Product price, 2. Landed price = Product price + Shipping costs
Your competitor sells a product for €10, and charges an additional €3 for shipping, making their landed price €13. You sell your product for €12 and don't charge separate shipping costs, so your landed price is €12.
- Without taking shipping costs into account, the Repricer would compare your listing price (12) to the listing price (10) of the competitor, and would therefore decrease your price to be lower than the competitor's price.
- If we do take shipping costs into account, the Repricer will compare your landed price (12 euro) to the landed price (13 euro) of your competitor. So, in this example your product price wouldn't be decreased.