What is a repricer?

A repricer changes your listing prices automatically in response to competitors, inside limits you set. Here is how that works.

A repricer is software that changes the price of your listings automatically,
in response to what competing sellers are charging, inside limits you set.

Instead of you checking a listing and deciding it should drop by 40p, the
repricer checks it - continuously - and makes that decision for you against a
rule you wrote once.

What a repricer actually does

Every repricer is doing the same four things in a loop:

  1. Read the competition. Who else is selling this product, and at what price. On marketplaces that rank on total cost, that means item price plus delivery, not the headline price.
  2. Compare it to your rule. Undercut by a penny, match, sit a percentage above, or hold position - whatever you told it to do.
  3. Check the price is allowed. Every listing has a floor and a ceiling you set. A price outside that band never gets sent.
  4. Push the new price. Through the marketplace's API, so the change is live within minutes rather than whenever you next open a spreadsheet.

Minimum and maximum price: the part that matters

The rules get the attention, but the price band is what makes a repricer safe
to leave running. The minimum is the lowest price you are willing to sell at;
the maximum is the highest you think the listing can carry.

Set the minimum from what the sale actually costs you - unit cost, marketplace
commission, payment fees, and your own postage - not from your current price. A
floor set at the current selling price is the single most common way a repricer
ends up doing nothing at all: the listing is already at its own floor, so there
is no room to move.

Repricer, price monitoring, dynamic pricing

These get used interchangeably and are not the same thing.

  • Price monitoring tells you what competitors charge. It watches; it does not act.
  • A repricer watches and then changes your price automatically.
  • Dynamic pricing is the broader idea of prices that move with demand, stock, or time of day. Repricing is the marketplace-competition flavour of it.

If a tool only emails you a report, it is monitoring, not repricing.

Do you need one?

The honest answer depends on catalogue size and how contested your listings are.

A handful of listings with no competing sellers does not need automation - the
price only changes when you decide it should. It starts to pay once you have
more listings than you can check by hand, or once several sellers are trading
the same product and position changes through the day. Manual repricing is not
just slow, it is uneven: the listings you happen to look at get managed, and the
rest drift.

Repricing on OnBuy

Re-Pricer is a repricer built for OnBuy sellers specifically. It connects
through the official OnBuy API, compares delivered prices rather than item
prices, and moves each listing inside the minimum and maximum you set for it.