In addition to offering a good assortment, carefully presenting and marketing the products, there is one thing that every seller must pay extra attention to and that is price. Price is often the deciding factor for the consumer to buy the product from that particular provider. But how do you ensure that your products have the most competitive price on the marketplaces and not just the cheapest?
Over the years a lot of technical gadgets have appeared on the market that make selling via marketplaces a lot easier. One of these technical gadgets is the Repricer. If you search the Internet for a repricer, you will undoubtedly find numerous providers. Many of these repricer software only apply the lowest price. The result is an endless battle between you and the competition as to who offers the lowest price, with the result that you offer your products at a much lower price than you would like.
But is it really wise to keep your products at a low price level all the time? In short, no. In a recent interview with bol.com, Mark Doors of online cookware retailer Habitas says that modern repricing should be about so much more than just the lowest price. Mark says that it is important to be able to offer a realistic and market-based price over a longer period of time - and thus to be able to make a profit.
A more efficient pricing strategy
A good pricing strategy includes a Repricer that you can fully customize to your needs. The EffectConnect Repricer allows sellers to have full control over pricing on various platforms, using scenario management.
The Repricer scans your competitors' product prices 24/7. Then software adjusts prices based on the criteria you set in conjunction with competitor price changes. You determine which products are qualified for the Repricer and which products should remain untouched.
With scenario management, the EffectConnect Repricer gives you the ability to create advanced rules, allowing you to set the Repricer's behavior based on different scenarios. Each scenario often requires a slightly different follow-up action.
For example, if you are the only provider of a certain product, you will not have any competition and therefore do not need to price competitively. But if your competitor is the best provider, i.e. has the best price in the buying block, you can use placeholders and custom attributes to determine the behavior of the Repricer. This way you make sure that you are pushed forward as the best provider.
Buy-box Maximization
The EffectConnect Repricer gives you the opportunity to use buy-box maximization. Buy-Box Maximization is an advanced setting within the Repricer to be able to keep the buy block longer with the best price, without losing sales. With Buy-Box Maximization you get the option to save the last buy-box price, and to activate it when you are in danger of losing the buy block. In this way, you can still creep up on the price every now and then, thus ensuring that you end up with a higher margin in the buy block.
Formulas made simple
A Repricer works on the basis of mathematical formulas, which you enter in the same way as you would on a calculator or in an Excel file.
For the formulas in the Repricer, you can make use of placeholders. These placeholders are variables that contain a value specific to a certain product. The Repricer has some fixed placeholders that represent values from the EffectConnect platform. However, you can also attach your own values (attributes) to placeholders, and thus use far-reaching dynamic data in combination with the "custom attributes", e.g. to use storage costs or shipping costs that are product-dependent in the formulas.
Some variables that are fixed in the platform:
- The purchase price (PI): this price is imported from your webshop when you enter it.
- The selling price (PV): this is the regular selling price as it appears in your webshop.
- The product price with markup (PO): this is the regular selling price with a markup that you have configured yourself within EffectConnect.
Using custom attributes as variables
Custom Attributes provide a lot of freedom to create new data. For example, based on the property of a product, such as weight, you can create a value for shipping costs. You could then use this value in a formula in the Repricer.
Another commonly used variable is a Custom Attribute to store the margin on an item. This is often determined by the purchase value or category of the item. When you store the margin in such an attribute, you can also easily use it in the Repricer's formulas.
An example:
We have a purchase price (PI), an attribute for margin that includes a multiplier (PHA), and an attribute for shipping (PHB). The formula would then be as follows: (PI * PHA) + PHB ). Of course, you can also use fixed values, e.g. if your shipping costs are always the same, e.g. 5.50 euros: (PI * PHA) + 550.
In short, by using placeholders in combination with Custom Attributes you can create super smart formulas with specific data for each product, without having to define formulas for each product.