No matter if you’re a small seller hawking a few items a week or a big-time merchant who handles thousands of orders, repricing should never be done manually. It takes too much time, mistakes are too easy to make and there are better solutions out there — like RepricerExpress!
Here are ten reasons to stop manual repricing today.
1. Waste of Time
If you’re the kind of seller who dabbles in single digits, then you may think manual repricing is for you. After all, why pay someone to do it when you can just handle it yourself? This line of thinking can get you into trouble because it’s habit-forming; as your business grows and you expand your inventory, manual repricing will take up more and more of your time and you’ll have to make that sacrifice somewhere else.
2. It’s Not Very Interesting
At first, searching for market prices for your products is easy and interesting because of the novelty of it. You’re doing it for the first time and it’s all so fresh and exciting, yeah? Fast forward a couple of months to when you’ve been performing the same Google searches hours each day and boredom quickly sets in — wouldn’t it be nice to let a computer program take it off your hands?
3. You Can Make Mistakes
We’ve all heard the horror stories about how merchants left a zero off the end and priced their items at a tenth of the intended price. It led to super-high volumes of sales, but also huge profit losses, too. And it’s so, so easy to avoid that with auto-repricing because all you have to do is set your min and max prices, and the software won’t exceed those parameters.
4. How Will You Keep Up?
If you’re selling some really rare, niche item, then yeah, okay, maybe you can get away with manual repricing. But if you don’t fall into that narrow category, then you’re going to come up against really rapid price changes from both your competitors and Amazon. There’s no way you can realistically go through your entire inventory and reprice things every 10-15 minutes — but your repricing software can!
Related: Manual Vs Automated Repricing: Which Is Best and Why?
5. The Pool of Sellers Just Keeps Getting Bigger
The main criterion sellers use when repricing their inventory is the prices their competitors set. There’s no set price that books or DVDs or shoes are sold at, just what the laws of supply and demand dictate. But factor in more and more sellers entering marketplaces all the time (increasing supply and decreasing demand), and you’ve got that extra bunch’s prices to watch for when setting your own prices.
6. Nobody’s Really Doing It Anymore
We’ll be the first to acknowledge that going along with the crowd’s mentality for the sake of uniformity may not always be the best idea, but there comes a time when numbers don’t lie. If you see the vast majority of sellers doing something, you have to ask yourself why that is. Are they practising a method that achieves great results and everyone’s caught on? If so, it might be something you should consider.
7. The Path to the Buy Box Will Be Harder
Price and sales are two of the strongest ways of winning a Buy Box from Amazon, so why complicate matters more than you have to? If someone told you that you could wave a magic wand and erase a few of the steps in getting there, would you take it? Repricing software can be that magic wand.
8. Half Your Metrics Won’t Matter
There are two types of metrics to consider when selling online: external and internal. External is something like looking at your competitors’ prices, while internal would be more about conversion rates and site traffic. Manual repricing would cut out the latter almost entirely, but not if you invest in repricing software and can use your statistics and brain to your advantage.
9. You’re Paying More in the End
If you weren’t your own boss, think about the possible salary you’d be pulling in if you were performing the same tasks at a company. Now think about how many paid hours you’d have to devote to manual repricing, and compare that to how much repricing software costs. Notice the difference? It’s just not worth the cost to do it yourself.
10. Free 14-day Trial
We may be a little biased towards auto-repricing at RepricerExpress, but in this post, we managed to back up its handiness with several useful points. Using it to grow your business and get ahead is a no-brainer, but only if you first sign up for your 14-day free trial and get the ball rolling.
