Repricing with limits you set and a reason for every price

01How a repricing rule sets a price

A rule covers one product, a category with its subcategories, or the whole catalog. When several rules cover a product, the one with the highest priority wins, and on a tie the narrower scope. Each rule follows one of four strategies:

• Match the lowest: the price of the cheapest eligible competitor.
• Beat the lowest: that price minus a percentage or a fixed amount.
• Percentile: a chosen point in the spread of competitor prices. The 25th percentile sits a quarter of the way up from the cheapest.
• Median band: stay within a band around the median competitor price, 5% either side by default. A price already inside the band gets no suggestion.

Each competitor counts once, at its cheapest eligible offer, and only offers in your store's currency count; nothing is converted. Your own shop is never treated as a competitor, and used or refurbished offers never count.

02Choosing which competitors count

The strategy is only as good as the offers it looks at, so each rule can narrow them:

• Exact matches only: sellers of the same Google Shopping product or Amazon ASIN, not similar items from a keyword search. Exact product matching explains the difference.
• Named sellers: follow only the shops or domains you list, or leave some out.
• No marketplaces: ignore listings on Amazon, eBay, bol.com, Kaufland and similar sites.
• In stock only: out-of-stock offers never count; this option also drops pre-order, backorder and unknown stock.
• Regions: use competitor prices from chosen regions only.
• Price basis: compare item prices, or total prices with shipping.
• Rounding: end prices in .99 or .95, or round to whole amounts.

03Guard rails that always hold

A rule never goes below the floor or MAP, above the ceiling, or past the maximum change. When the limits contradict each other, for example a floor above the ceiling, it makes no suggestion and says why instead of breaking one. The same happens when there is no current price of your own, a margin floor has no unit cost, no competitor qualifies, every competitor price is older than a maximum age you set, or the cooldown is running.

Just before a price is written, the MAP floor and the rule's floor and ceiling are checked again, in case they changed after the suggestion was made. Unit costs come from the cost column of a CSV or Google Merchant feed import, or are typed in on the product page.

04Every suggestion explains itself

A suggestion records the strategy, the target price, and the competitor offer it followed: seller, domain, price, region, whether it is an exact match and how old that price is, for example "read 12 days ago". It shows the floor and ceiling in force, the range the maximum change allowed, and which limit set the final price (minimum price, margin, MAP, maximum price, MSRP or maximum change). It also keeps a snapshot of up to 50 competitor offers, one per seller.

Suggestions are worked out about 2 minutes after each price check of a product, so all its regions' results are in, and on demand with Recalculate, for one product at once or up to 5,000 in one run. A newer suggestion replaces a pending one, and a pending suggestion expires after 72 hours.

Every seller counts at its latest price. Sellers whose pages Pricebeeper re-reads between monthly searches count at their newest read. Sellers it can't re-read, such as Amazon sellers, keep the price the last monthly search found until the next one, and that price still counts. A seller that no search has listed for 44 days has left the market and stops counting.

05The approval queue

1. 1

   Review

   Suggestions wait in a queue you can filter by status, store, product or rule, and search by title or GTIN.

2. 2

   Approve or reject

   One at a time or in bulk. A rejection can carry a note for your team.

3. 3

   Apply

   Approved prices are written to your store. Bulk actions can approve and apply in one step.

4. 4

   Revert if needed

   A written change can be undone, which writes the old price back as a new, logged change.

Once a day, an email and an in-app notice tell the owner, and teammates who receive alert emails, how many suggestions are waiting. It has its own repricing preference and unsubscribe link.

06Writing prices to Shopify, WooCommerce or anywhere else

Shopify writes go through the Pricebeeper Shopify app. The app installs with read access only; changing prices needs Shopify's permission to write products, which the store owner grants from the app when turning repricing on. Pricebeeper updates the chosen variant, or every variant when they all share one price. Before writing, it reads the current price back: a price someone changed in Shopify after the suggestion is not overwritten.

WooCommerce writes use a read/write REST API key you create in your store, kept encrypted, over HTTPS only. On a product that is on sale, the regular price stays as the former price and the new price becomes the sale price. Stores on plain permalinks are reached through WordPress's alternative REST address. WooCommerce only accepts API keys there from version 11.1, so an older store gets a clear message to change the permalink setting or update.

Any other platform gets approved prices as a CSV export (product, GTIN, variant, current and suggested price, currency and change) and as a price.suggestion.approved event to your Slack or webhook destinations. Mark a suggestion as applied once your system has set it, which starts the cooldown.

Writes that hit a store's rate limit or an outage are retried up to 5 times, and no store gets more than 60 writes a minute. A failed write shows in the app with a plain reason, such as a read-only key or a product deleted from the store. Every written price is logged with who asked for it and sent as a price.applied event. Only the latest change to a product can be reverted, and not when the old price would now break a MAP policy.

07Automatic repricing on Pro and up

On Pro, Business and Custom, a rule can apply its own prices. Each automatic change needs all of these at that moment:

• 10 approvals by hand: the rule can't be switched to automatic until people have approved at least 10 of its suggestions.
• A daily cap: fewer than 100 automatic changes across the account in the last 24 hours.
• The pause switch off: one switch stops every automatic change in the account, while suggestions keep coming.
• The platform switch on: Pricebeeper can stop automatic changes for every account at once.

Automatic changes use the same limits, writes and logs as manual ones, and are marked as made by the rule. A suggestion the store can't take yet, such as one for a Shopify store that hasn't granted write permission, is left in the queue for a person.

08Who can do what

Members write rules and approve or reject suggestions. Applying and reverting prices, and switching a rule to automatic, need the owner or an admin, unless the owner lets members apply. Store connections and repricing settings belong to the owner and admins, and viewers can only look. API keys can read suggestions and writes but can't approve or apply, and no repricing change can be made while Pricebeeper staff are signed in to your account for support. Teams and security covers roles.

09What repricing doesn't do

• Prices are written to Shopify and WooCommerce only. Magento, BigCommerce, PrestaShop and other platforms use the CSV export or the webhook.
• It doesn't reprice your Amazon or other marketplace listings and doesn't track the Buy Box. Amazon repricers such as those in the Informed comparison do that.
• Rules react to the data they see. On Growth and up, a known seller's change reaches the rule within a day, or within 6 hours for the 5 cheapest offers, when its page can be read. Offers that update only at the monthly search, such as Amazon's, reach it once a month, and so does a new seller.
• There is no demand or elasticity model: rules follow competitor prices within your limits.

Among self-serve monitoring tools, Prisync's pricing page puts repricing on its $199 Premium plan and Pricefy's on its $99 Pro plan. The Pricefy comparison sets the two side by side, and MAP monitoring explains the policies that act as a floor here.

Questions people ask