To compete on Amazon, you need competitive advantages wherever possible. Repricers offer that competitive advantage, but not all repricers are created equal. On this episode of Amazon Seller School, Todd interviews Ian Kaneshiro, Head of Sales and Customer Success at Seller Snap on all things repricing and why Seller Snap can transform your business. Stay tuned.
Listen
Watch
Why A Repricer?
First things first, why invest in a repricer anyway? Well, roughly 80% of all purchases on Amazon go through the buy box. That means nailing your price point daily is essential for success on Amazon. Without a repricer, you’d spend your entire day in seller central updating prices to keep your spot in the buy box. Because prices change by the minute, that’s simply not possible.
The Value of Seller Snap
Amazon’s free repricing tool works fine if you’re just starting out. But Seller Snap takes a different approach from other repricers to help grow your business. Forget rule-based repricing, Seller Snap takes a cooperative approach, meaning the end goal is to maximize your profit. Not to mention, because you’re not inputting complex rules, Seller Snap’s AI saves you valuable time.
All About AI
Let’s talk about AI or artificial intelligence. Seller Snap uses AI to holistically understand the competitive landscape and then make business decisions based on that landscape. For example, let’s say $74.99 wins you the buy box. That’s great. But in some instances, $79.00 can also win you the buy box. Seller Snap capitalizes on that distinction.
With AI, you’re not only winning the buy box, you’re snagging a higher profit from each individual sale. In some cases, that may just be five cents extra per sale, but multiply that five cents by hundreds of products and you’re sitting pretty profit-wise.
Types of Repricing on Seller Snap
There is no one-size-fits-all repricing method. It’s great to have options and Seller Snap allows sellers to customize their repricing strategy. In addition to its AI, Seller Snap offers rule-based methods similar to its competitors, but with a twist:
Win The Buy Box: This rule allows sellers to use their own buy box strategy without AI. Use this if you’re trying to aggressively sell products.
Conditional Repricing: The fine-tuning approach. Use both AI and other repricing methods for certain scenarios. For example, you can use AI unless you’re not getting a purchase. If you don’t get a purchase within 24-hours, move to a different strategy until you make a sale.
Velocity-Driven Repricing: Target minimum orders or total orders in a given time period. The repricer will raise and lower that price and find the sweet spot so it can continuously sell and hit its target number of orders in a 30-day period. Consider this if you’re selling a higher volume in a given time period. Perhaps you need to sell 500 per month to keep an exclusivity agreement.
Ian’s Advice for Sellers
As you grow your business, it’s important to start automating big picture decisions. It’s easier to fix processes while you’re still small as opposed to when you’ve doubled or tripled. When it comes to decisions on Seller Snap, Ian recommends starting with the AI feature and adjusting as you go.
Also remember the importance of data. Seller Snap provides dozens of different data points for each listing. Check out the data columns for each listing and use filters to see what’s affecting your bottom line the most.
Overall
Click here for 30% off your first month of Seller Snap. You can also give it a 15-day free trial with no credit card information needed. While pricier than its competitors, remember that Todd heard about Seller Snap from sellers doing bigger business for a reason. Tools like Seller Snap help you move from mid-level seller to top-selling superstar.
As always, happy selling everybody.
Resources From This Episode
Outline of This Episode
[00:20] Todd’s introduction to this episode
[04:53] Why do you need a repricer?
[08:34] Seller Snap’s value
[11:17] All about AI
[20:24] The types of repricing on Seller Snap
[40:48] Ian’s advice for sellers
[53:06] Todd’s closing thoughts
Transcript
ammouncer (00:01):
Welcome fellow entrepreneurs to the Amazon Seller School podcast, where we talk about Amazon wholesale and how you can use it to build an eCommerce empire, a side hustle or anything in between. And now your host, Todd Welch,
todd (00:20):
What’s going on, everybody welcome to episode 45 to the entrepreneur venture podcast, and today we are diving into repricing on Amazon. I’ve got on Ian from sellersnap.io, which is the repricer that I have switched to. And a lot of other big Amazon sellers are switching to because they have this thing called AI repricing or artificial intelligence repricing, which goes a step above and beyond a lot of their competition. And we really dive in today tips and tricks and tactics that you can do with repricing, and also why you should have repricing as an Amazon seller. So really good episode, a lot of really great information. So you’re definitely gonna want to stay tuned. Listen to this. You’re going to pick up some tips and tricks if you already have a repricer. And then if you’re not sure what a reprice there is or why you would want to reprice there for selling on Amazon, definitely going to want to stay tuned because we dive into that world as well.
todd (01:27):
And for anyone interested in switching over to seller snap, or starting to try out seller snap, I’ve secured a 30% off discount for your first month. Just head on over to amazonseller.school/snap S N A P. You can get that and you can also pick up a 15 day free trials. They can try them out. No questions asked no credit card or anything cancel. If you don’t want to move forward, or you don’t even have to cancel, right. You just ignore it and forget about it because no credit card needed, which is good. So Amazon Seller School.com/snap for that show notes and everything else for this episode can be found atamazonseller.school/45. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and dive into this episode. All right. So today I have Ian Kaneshiro on with us. He is the head of sales and customer success over at seller snap, which is the repricer that I have been using for all of my products on Amazon. It works fantasticly. So Ian, welcome to the show.
ian (02:38):
Thank you, Tom, for having me on, I’m really happy to be here and talk about Amazon repricing.
todd (02:43):
Yeah, absolutely. I’m looking forward to diving into that. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background? How are we jumped on here? You mentioned that you are out in Israel.
ian (03:00):
Yeah. So I’m actually taking this from Tel Aviv. As you can see the work from home thing for the time being + during the pandemic. Generally, you know, we sit in the office, with our team. And so the majority of our operations are based out of Israel. we have some help from our us office as well. And the background at sellersnap goes back to I believe 2017 in order to help solve the problem of price Wars in repricing. And so between Coming up with a complex strategy , and in the way that we work in an AI based strategy in order to help get the buy box at the highest possible price, seller’s snap has really involved into a solution for both automated repricing and an analytic solution for Amazon.
todd (03:58):
Yeah. And before you guys, I was using Bqool. So B Q O O L and their software is fine, but, you know, and I do pretty good on Amazon. I like to think of myself as one of the bigger sellers, but sellers even bigger than myself doing like five, 10, $20 million a year turned me on to you guys. And I made the switch, unfortunately, like right as the pandemic hit. So I couldn’t get like a great AB test, just the different tools and stuff you guys have makes it better than Bqool for me. But before we dive into all that stuff, we should probably dive into because I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who are maybe just getting started with Amazon and stuff like that. And wondering why would they even need a repricer to sell on Amazon? Right. And I think that’s it,
ian (04:53):
The question and what it comes down to is why we need to reprice there is to really understand, you know, what is the buy box and why is it important? And we know that the buy box is important because it’s something I read. I read a stat recently that something like 80% of all purchases go through the buy box when I’m on Amazon, just because, you know, I work in this space, all I will go and check all the different offers and make that decision. I’ll maybe I can maybe I’ll wait a week and get paid a little bit less, but especially when it comes to ordering prime. And when I need that one thing in my two day shipping I’m going straight to the buy box and and place my order. And so, because so many people purchase like that, it’s important for third party sellers to compete for that space, to be in the buy box at the time that the sellers want to, or that the buyers are ready to buy.
todd (05:54):
Yeah, for sure. And without a repricer, you’re pretty much going to be spending the entire day in seller central, like updating your prices to try to stay in the buy box. Right. Because those prices a lot of products change by the minute.
ian (06:09):
Absolutely. And that’s the, no, that’s a really good point that, you know, so many sellers out there, I would say the majority of them are using some kind of repricer, whether it is Amazon, you know, kind of built in repricer that they make available through seller central or one of the many third parties out there because everyone is using this, using some kind of technology to be updating their practice, 24 seven. If you are manually repricing, , you might be able to handle it during the day, but it’s a, it’s really a full time job. And you’re going to be able to consistently update you know, hundreds or even thousands of listings all day, every day, 24 seven.
todd (06:54):
Yeah, absolutely. Now I’m going to put you on the spot here, so it’s okay if you don’t know this, but do you know how many repricing how many times seller snap is repricing? Like every minute or every second? Do you already have those figures?
ian (07:11):
how many skews that sellersnap is repricing at any one time? Ooh, I do have those figures available. I could look at them. I don’t know, off the top of my head, but it’s in the millions of listings.
todd (07:29):
Alright, awesome. I’ll send that over to you. Yeah, that’ll be just a cool stat. It doesn’t really mean anything necessarily, but just kind of an interesting stat for sure. But yeah, so Amazon’s got its own reprice there now, which, you know, if people are just starting out, don’t have much cash, they’re trying to start a business using something like Amazon’s repricer would work fine. I’m always a little bit leery of using anything that Amazon puts out because Amazon’s main interest is building their business and getting their customers the lowest prices. And my main interest is building my business and increasing my profits. So we’re kind of at odds with each other a little bit. Hopefully they wouldn’t take that into account, but you never know, but why would someone as they’re building their business, want to switch to something like seller snap rather than just keep using the free reprice that Amazon gives us.
ian (08:34):
There’s a lot of really good points there. And I think one of the first things I want to touch on is in terms of building a business, right, when you are, when you’re just getting started, you know, sometimes you got to take , take what you can get in terms of and really take your cashflow into account and say, all right, am I going to put, I have a little bit of extra cash. Am I going to put it into more inventory? Or am I going to put it into software? And that’s a business decision from the, from the side of the seller. But when we’re talking about moving into a third party, repricer moving into sellersnap in particular,
ian (09:12):
It’s really important to make the differentiation between the different types of reprices out there. So most of the repricers out there, including the ones on Amazon are what we would call a rule based repricer.
ian (09:27):
What that means is that the seller would have to go in and set up a series of complex rules if a then B. And so some common examples are, if I’m not in the buy box, undercut the buy box winner by a penny, to some extent of that,
ian (09:49):
Yeah, and arguably, you know, some people say, you know, I need to, I need to do that. So I can be in the buy box and sell, because if I’m not selling, I’m not making money. Who cares if it’s a little bit less. And then on the other side, there’s this idea of, well, I need, I want to maximize the amount I want to maximize my profit per sale. And so that’s where seller snap comes into play, Because what we do is we take a cooperative approach.
ian (10:15):
to win in the buy box, so we’re not going in and saying, I need to win a hundred percent of the buy box. Every single time what were saying is,
ian (10:25):
I want to win my fair buy box. So if I have one other competitor to make it simple, you know, my fair share is 50%. And so back to my original point about the difference between a rule based or price or in seller snap is with seller snap. You do not have to set up complex rules in order to get started. You really only need to set up your min and max and turn on the repricer and let it go.
todd (10:51):
Yeah. And you guys call it the AI repricer, right. That’s just the default method that goes to
ian (10:58):
Correct. So if you were to do it without making any changes to a listing, you’d be using our default AI method.
todd (11:05):
Absolutely. Okay. So what’s the idea behind the AI repricer or what exactly is it looking for? Is it just aiming for like that percentage of the buy box or what all is it doing?
ian (11:17):
That’s a good question. So basically it’s looking at, it’s a two pronged approach, right? Because it’s two ideas pulling in two separate directions. It’s about getting the buy box number one, so I can make that sale. And it’s about getting a higher profit for each individual sale. In order to do one, you have to lower the price in order to do the other, you have to raise the price. And so what the AI is doing, it’s really trying to understand the competitive landscape and understand the decisions that our competitors make based on the, that we make. And so, you know, a quick example is that if I see my competitor is always undercutting me by a penny, but I, and then I can assume that their rule is to undercut me by a penny. That means they’re attached to my price. That means I can use that information and raise the price. And so if I raise the price to a certain point, they’ll come with me. And then from there, then I can be a bit more aggressive, undercut them to capture my buy box, share, and we’ll start mini price war for it, but then I can always reset. And so that means instead of, you know, just capturing by box all the way down to my men, I’m still taking that same process, but I’m doing it in a different range. I’m doing it at the higher price point.
todd (12:41):
Yeah, for sure. So I have a good example of that in work, I have a product and the person that I’m competing against is selling it for 74 99. And it doesn’t look like they use a repricer because no matter what, what price I am at, they just stay the same. And so most like if I was using Amazon or bqool, it would match me at 74 99 to get that buy box. And we would split the sales. But what I’ve actually seen that seller snap has done is it didn’t match 74 99, but it found out that I get just as good of a buy box percentage at 75 Oh four. And so it keeps it at that, you know, it’s not a huge difference. It’s like 5 cents, but you multiply that over maybe 300 products. And, you know, just one example that I’ve noticed, I’m sure there’s tons that I haven’t noticed because I, you know, I’ve got a bunch of products, but it’s just kind of interesting where other repricers probably would have knocked me down to 74 99. You guys are keeping me at 75, four, five, and getting me to sales still at that price point.
ian (13:52):
Yeah. I think that’s a really good point. And I’m glad you brought that up because what sellers is trying to do, isn’t it say, if they keep asking yourself the question, all right, do I have the buy box? If I have the buy box, can I keep that target percentage at a higher price? And so in this scenario, you know, you said you were at 74 99 and it hit its target buy box share to say, all right, it’s 74 99. I’m getting the buy box. Great. What about a 75 75 Oh one Oh two or three until it gets to, you know, 75 Oh six and loses the buy box, then it’s able to say, Oh, I’ve gone too far.. Let’s back up. And I’ve kinda
todd (14:33):
Find that sweet spot. Yup. Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that I really liked about your software too, that I found really helpful is so I sell a lot of like two, three, four, five packs of different products. Right. And the problem I’ve always had in the past with using be cool was that I just had to basically compete on that buy box of that. Multi-Pack and so let’s say the single price product is at $10. And so I want to maybe keep it under $19. So I’d have to set my max that like $19 or $18, but then if the single price went down to say $6 and I’m still at $19, now, it doesn’t make sense to buy my two pack. Right. But normal repricers don’t know anything about any other Asin, but what I really liked about yours is I can actually set it to compete against a different Asin. So I actually set it to compete against the single product and then multiply it to get the price for the two, three, four pack. But then I can also set it to say that, okay, if a FBA person comes on this listing with me, let’s switch it to now compete against that FBA person so that I can stay in competition with them. So that I found really useful for like multi-packs and things like that. Yeah.
ian (16:04):
In terms of what you’re using, what will we call that is a follow related ASIN and we have also follow related Asin and we also have follow multiple related. And it’s a great use case. Exactly what you came up with is when I have a multipack, when I create my own bundles and I am generally the only seller on a listing. And so that could go for bono creation or even a private label product as well. It puts you in a position where all right, I don’t have a, I don’t have someone to compete against in the buy box, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have Competition. So it allows you to stay in a competitive landscape.
ian (16:41):
To go off. The first point you were talking about when we’re talking about one pack, two packs and three packs, you know, we also want to be really careful because Amazon will pay, it, does pay attention to that. And they will, they try to discourage, you know, selling a two pack at a higher price than I could buy two,
todd (17:03):
One pack sports. Yeah. Especially right now with the, with all the quote, price gouging that Amazon claims is going on right now. And I was listening to hear the conversation earlier, not to get off topic or anything, but they were talking about, you know, by them having a floor, you know, where with their fees and everything, a bottom price that you can sell something at. And then now they’re coming from the top trying to stop you know, price not price fixing, but price gouging. They’re almost creating a circumstance where they’re price fixing right there. Like your price has to be in this range to sell, not anything to do with repricing.
ian (17:50):
But it’s just an interesting idea that I could see Amazon getting in trouble for that too. I mean, you know, Amazon, I’m sure Amazon has their own regulatory problems that they’re working with both internally and externally. We see that when you know, Jeff Bezos goes to Congress or to the EU subpoena is Amazon as well in terms of you know, fair practices. So it’s a weird world where self-governing entity that is Amazon is now seems like it might be more and more governed by the actual government of the world.
todd (18:29):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s definitely going to happen. It’s, it’s always just a matter of time as businesses get super big, like Amazon. So it’s going to be interesting to watch how it falls down and everything plays out here for sure. So, let’s see. So the other thing that I really like with your guys’s software is just the dashboard where I can see my like profits and, you know, the total number of sales, my profit, my profit margin, my ROI and everything like that.
ian (19:03):
A lot of people use like something like seller board for that information. And I’m kind of getting that all right in your guys’s software, which is really nice as well. Yeah. You know, I think that is a major value proposition for Amazon sellers where you can start to use seller snap for, more and more tasks in your day to day as an Amazon seller and especially when it comes to repricing information on your P and L is, is super important. And so I think it’s, it’s really nice not to have to go to another third party solution to see those numbers. And then and then go back to seller step to make any adjustments you can kind of do it all in one place.
todd (19:50):
Yeah, for me, it’s really nice because I can just log into the repricer, you know, if I’m going to make a change or something anyways, and I can just see my numbers right there at the top, compare it to last week and everything, and actually see if I made a change or something, see how that change took effect.
todd (20:08):
So it’s really nice, really helpful for me. What other things I know there’s a lot of other from that dropdown on seller snap. What other ways can we do repricing that you guys recommend on Sellersnap?
ian (20:24):
There’s a few different things you can do. You know, the AI being our main repricing strategy, the majority of our sellers will use the AI at least out of the box for brand new listings, see how it works. And of course, with the million sellers out there, and even in the millions of listings from those millions of sellers, there’s no one size fits all solution repricing method for every single listing. So having the ability to customize your pricing strategy is super important. And I think that’s what you’re referring to. And so in addition to the AI, and we also spoke about you know follow related to Asin as well, we have a large number of you know, rule based methods.
ian (21:17):
So just like the rule based methods you would find in many of our other third party competitors and with an Amazon, we have things like follow lowest FPA, lowest FBM followed by box. And that that’s kind of a given, but the really cool aspect that I want to talk about is our win buy box strategy, number one, and number two, conditional repricing. And so the win buy box strategy basically says allows the user to put their own target, buy box strategy instead of letting the AI do it. And what the wind buyback strategy will do is they’ll become more and more aggressive in order to hit that target buy box share. So if the cooperative strategy of the AI is not aggressive enough for you, what you can do is you can always increase that and say, you know, let’s become more aggressive on this listing.
ian (22:10):
because I need to move more products or even I need to liquidate product. So that’s number one. Number two is the conditional a repricing. And the reason why I really liked this is because it allows me to use both AI repricer and other repricing methods in certain scenarios. This does work kind of like a rule based system. So it’s almost a hybrid model. So one of the really common ones that all used with sellers, they’re all suggested sellers. I want to use the AI strategy unless I’m not getting a purchase. And so there’s scenarios on lower velocity items where you can get a purchase in 1224, 48 hours. And what I can do is I can set a condition that says, if no purchase in 24 hours, let’s move through different strategies, such as win buy box. And so what will happen is that condition will stay on wind by box and keep competing for that higher buy box percentage until I make that sale.
ian (23:15):
And then I’ll move back to the AI strategy once I made that sale to kind of reset and keep that price elevated.
todd (23:23):
Yeah, for sure. I, I’m just looking through the dropdown here and it’s always nice. You know, the AI is awesome because like you said, a lot of times you can just set it and forget it. And one thing I’ve seen with a lot of new people who are trying to set up a repricer is they are having trouble trying to figure out the million different settings that some of these softwares have. So having that AI
todd (23:46):
repricer is Golden but also having the fine tuning things like you mentioned if you want to kind of dig a little bit deeper and make things change or a little bit differently, I’m just looking at the dropdown here. You’ve guys got like wind by box. Like you mentioned that the last purchase price, reoccurring price change, follow, buy box, follow competitor, fixed price, set, the max price that demand follow related ACE follow a multiple follow lowest multiple competitors and so on. And so on lots of different options that we can do. And like you said, that conditional thing is awesome, right? You’re you might not use a lot of these just by themselves, but if a certain condition is met, then you can switch between them, which is really nice to get advanced like that. If you want it to. Not really necessary though.
ian (24:45):
I usually suggest that when we’re starting out, we use the AI repricer because it takes the complication out of it. Right. And because I’ve seen a ton of setups and often how we’ll describe it kind of internally is when you are making a list of complicated rules, it’s pretty easy to kind of poking holes, or I call it poking holes. It’s really easy to poke holes into strategies and where sellers kind of backed themselves into a corner because they won’t tell the repricer what to do in a specific scenario. So the AI repricer really helps take out that, that guesswork. And the last thing that I want to talk about is I forgot to mention this because it is actually really new as of this week. So it’ll, by the time this airs it’ll already have been out for a few weeks.
ian (25:38):
We just launched and we’re in kind of a beta stage of velocity driven repricing. So it’s it’s just one more thing that sellersnaps is doing in order to provide more options and more scenarios for all of us sellers and all different kinds of sellers.
todd (25:56):
Okay. explain that one a little bit more, what exactly is that going to be doing if we set for that one
ian (26:02):
what this does Is you get to pick one of two strategies. You would either get the target, excuse me minimum orders or total orders in a given time period. And what it’s gonna do is it’s going to try to raise and lower the price and kind of find that sweet spot. So you can continually sell and hit that target number of orders. Let’s say a 30 day period, and this repricing method. It’s really important to understand that this is for items that you generally have more velocity on because in terms of, and I’m not economic expert, but by any means, but in terms of, you know, price elasticity and understanding, like, does my price matter in between, you know, a dollar here and there when I’m only moving, you know, three, four, five, six items a month? Probably not. So we’re talking about more items that are a little bit more hot and you’re selling a higher volume in a given time period. Okay.
todd (27:12):
Yeah. That makes sense. Because, you know, if, especially, I could see if you were like, I had an exclusive on a product or something, you know, and so you’re working with the brand, the brand obviously wants to sell more. You want to make more profit, but you could set it to say, I want to make sure I sell 500 of these the month, at least, but otherwise make sure to try to maximize my profit and my understanding that right.
ian (27:40):
In a very simple term, right. It’s about saying, I want to make sure that I sell 500, cause I need to order 500 a month to keep my deal, for example. And then once I hit that target, I can start to afford to take a little bit try to raise the price and see if I can keep selling more at the higher price point and still have that maximization for sure.
todd (28:05):
Yeah. I can definitely see the benefit of that. And it’s always good to have the more options, right. Because everybody’s going to be different. You know, I’ve been working with you to do things that probably other people aren’t necessarily doing, like with the API, for example, because I want to inject my costs right into your guys’ software. So my virtual assistants are having to manually enter that stuff all the time. And if something changes in my software where I keep all the information on my inventory, it’ll just push it over to seller snaps. So that’s one of the big reasons that I moved over to you guys. Well, because you have the API, which for anybody who’s not familiar with programming, that’s like the programming interface connection between two software so that they can talk to each other and send data back.
ian (29:02):
Right. And, you know, I was, well, I don’t know if you, if you watched it. I think it was last week or the week before, there was a kind of like a big webinar conference thing hosted by Amazon called accelerate. And they had a lot of different people talking about different aspects of Amazon. And one of the things that I remember, it was something like it was hours of, you know, watching videos, but you’re not going to absorb everything. But one of the things that stuck with me is for Amazon sellers to develop these kinds of partnerships and to take on the ad, you know, thoughtful, we add a SAS solution, software solutions to their to their software stack in order to automate their processes and really find that competitive advantage over their other Amazon sellers. And so whether that is a repricing solution and inventory management system, or even what you’re doing about trying to make that connection to take that one extra step off out of your, out of your day. So you and your team can focus on other places to increase efficiency, finding ways to make your life easier is one of the ultimate competitive advantages. That was my takeaway from what I was listening to last week.
todd (30:29):
Yeah, for sure. It’s, it’s super important. And like another thing that I want to do with your guys’ software you know, once my program really understands the API and we get everything working is I want to create software to do it automatically. For me, for example, let’s say I’m looking at a product and for whatever reason, it hasn’t gotten any sales in like a week. I want it to automatically lower the min price and lower the max price. So it just keeps coming down, you know, and just keep dropping it maybe by a penny, like every hour or 25 cents every hour until it starts getting sales. And so that, that inventory is not just sitting there because we don’t want to start acting fees and stuff like that from a storage and things like that. So that’s another thing that I want to do right now. That’s something that my virtual assistants, they go in and they got a manual manually, you know, download all the listings and look at everything and, and make those changes. But doing that by the API and just having a program, just doing that all the time would be so much easier and save a lot of time.
ian (31:40):
Absolutely. And that at the end of the day, it’s the definition of, you know, time is money and what you’re doing right now and setting it up and putting the extra resources into coming up, making the API connection and coming up with the strategy is an investment into, you know, into the future of your Amazon business.
todd (32:02):
Yup. For sure. Yeah. As you grow, it’s definitely all about finding those different automations that you can do and ways to decrease expenses and stuff like that. And just be more competitive really, because it’s like with the example that I just said, it’s so hard, I’m at about 300 different products that I’m carrying, but there are people who are carrying, like you said, thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of different products. And it’s just impossible to go through that one by one, without some kind of computer program going through that stuff for you. So if I can develop that now at 300 products, when I get to 1,003 thousand, it’ll just be so much easier. Yeah.
ian (32:49):
I think at the best piece of advice for this kind of process is to also develop the system, but also develop a way to kind of audit the decision making processes that’s a strategy and your system that you’re building now is going to put into place because things will change in six months in a year, in five years. And so once you put that system in place, you want to put yourself in a position where, you know, we’re two quarters from now I can look back and I can say, is this working for me? And just like everything else you said, if you don’t do it now, it’s just going to become a bigger and bigger task, as you grow.
todd (33:33):
Yup. Yup. Absolutely. Automation is huge. You know, like we just talked about at the very beginning, why do you need a repricer? And it’s, it’s really all about the automation, right? So you’re not sitting in there repricing your product 50 times a day because your competition is, and if you’re not keeping up with that, you’re, you’re not going to be be able to compete. Unfortunately. And, and one thing I just thought of that would be awesome in the software and maybe it is in there and I’m just not finding it. So we were talking about the packs, right? So competing against the one pack for the two pack, what would be really nice. And the one thing that I don’t see is so competing with the one pack, right? And then you do the conditional statement. If there’s an FBA seller compete with the FBA seller, which is fine, but it’d be nice if there was one more step in there where if there’s an FBA seller and they’re lower price, then it can compete with the FBA seller.
ian (34:35):
I do understand what you’re saying. And I’m just trying to think if there’s a way that we could do that. Cause look at, so my thought is always that there are generally multiple roads to the same point. And so I think that what I’m hearing from you is saying that I only want to compete with the FBA seller if they’re competing with me, if they’re competing for the buy box, because just saying, if they’re lower than me, I want to compete is one thing. But if they’re in general competing for the buy box, that’s the similar point, right? Cause I still want to pay attention to that. And so we do have an option that says if FBA seller exists and it’s competing for buy box a little tick box in there, then you can make that decision. And so basically what we’re saying is, you know, if I have the FBA competitor and they’re at a fixed price, they don’t matter right now, leave them alone, stay with my default repricing method. But if they are actively competing with me, that’s why I want to make sure I’m, making decisions to stay relevant.
todd (35:50):
Yeah, no, for sure. That would definitely be helpful. So the only step on top of that, and we might be getting a little too into the weeds for the podcast, but that’s all right. So let’s say I’m on the two pack and the one pack is at $10. So I have the two pack at $18 and someone comes in the buy box and matches me at $18. So now it’s, whiches over, do the AI repricer, right? Cause we’re competing. What if the AI repricer brings the buy box up to $20 or $22. Cause that’s where I have my max price set at. And now the price of the two pack is higher than the one pack. That’s a pretty great switch back and say, Hey, let’s go back to competing against the ACE. And because now that price is lower,
ian (36:42):
I would have to look at that. And I think we can take that specific area offline and look at the different set ups together and see how it would react because I’m also very visual. So it makes more sense for me to, you know, talk it out, write it down and look at the different sets and decide what’s the best setup is. But you’re right. There are always going to be situations when we have two different objectives such as making sure that my two pack is always more competitive than my one pack per unit. And my one pack is competitive against any other competitors that it has in the buy box. Those are two different objectives that we have to look at and it can’t get rather complicated, but that is a great segue into seller support team. That we’re more than happy to help you out with that. And you probably noticed on your, on the platform and that we have, we have that help button. We have the knowledge base. And if you have a question like that, we’re more than happy to, you know, dig into that, help you come up with a strategy that works for you based on the tools that we have. And you know, our team is super responsive and super helpful in that way.
todd (37:58):
Sure. I’ve used you guys as support quite a bit. You know, we’ve been working on the API and everything, you guys are definitely responsive for me. That’s one of the biggest things in software. Obviously you guys have the AI reprice their advantage, but the biggest thing for me, for any software is the support that you receive when you’re using the software, because that’s just what separates everybody apart. I mean, you can get cheaper software for sure, but you know, a lot of times you get what you pay for, especially in the support department, which gets cut real fast as the price goes down. And you know, it
ian (38:36):
Kind of makes sense in that manner, because there’s a lot of things that come into it. And one of the things that makes the support team really strong is existing and having, and being capable, people who are there and who really want to help the customers in order to help them succeed. And that goes, whether it’s, that goes for software companies like us, like seller steps, but also for, for Amazon sellers when it comes down to reviews and customer input through Amazon.
todd (39:06):
Yup. Yeah. It’s huge. I’m always surprised like when I’m looking at different softwares and I go to a website and I’m looking, I I have a certain question, so I send like a message to their cap or their support and they’ll like, never get back to you sometimes, or it’ll take days. There’s something it’s like, you know, I haven’t even started using you guys and you can’t get back to me How is that going to work once I’m actually a customer? You know?
ian (39:34):
Yeah. I mean working in software, it’s a tough solution or it’s a tough situation out there. You got balance. There’s a lot about, there’s a balancing act to that, but again, you know, it’s important that you know, we put our customers first and we do everything we can to help solve the problems. Are we perfect in terms of being able to solve a problem every time? No, that’s part of being human that’s part of being limited by technology. But I think that also brings a different aspect in that we are aware of that and we are aware that, you know, there are humans on the other side of our platform, our users who put their trust in the platform and our team to do everything they can to do everything we can in order to help their hands on business. And that’s something that, you know, we can guarantee is that we’re always gonna, you know, kind of put on for our customers.
todd (40:33):
Yeah, for sure. I appreciate that. Always a benefit to have good support for sure. So, anything else that we are forgetting any tricks or tips or secrets that we should add in,
ian (40:48):
In terms of, in terms of repricing I think we’ve covered everything we need to look at at the big picture and then go granular from there. So I know a lot of sellers will go in and try to make complicated rules with the AI repricer, even though they’re not quite sure what it’s doing, you know, my opinion is always try out the AI repricer, see how it works and then make our adjustments as we go. So that’s number one, don’t try to do too much in the beginning. You want to take it step by step and do it in the right way. So we don’t have to backtrack, erase everything we did and start from the beginning anyways. And then the second thing that we really want to get into is the data there are. And I always lose track of this because we’re adding it all the time.
ian (41:38):
There are, you know, probably 60 or 70, maybe even more different data points for each individual listing that others can dive into. And so my tip is to look at that look at that column section and we have hidden and visible columns. So look at that column section and look at those different data points that you might even, you might not even know that it matters to your business, but, and it might ring a bell that says, Oh, this is something that I didn’t even know I needed that is available to me and use the filters to find where it affects your bottom line the most. And that’s how you can really get the most out of your business. I know, as when I talked to sellers about repricing and using repricer, it’s really easy for me to say, Oh, let’s look at all the winners, let’s look at all the places where we’re seller snap killed it and was able to get, you know, more profit per sale more buy box share. That’s the easy part, the hard part. And I think the most important part is to find the areas for improvement, what wasn’t going well, and what steps can I take in order to do better. And I think coming from just kind of taking a different perspective on that and in terms of how I’m looking at data is one of the best things I can do , for my business, for an Amazon business.
todd (43:09):
Yeah. Absolutely. Data is definitely King that’s for sure. You got to know how manipulate the data and use it to your advantage, but having it, like you said, there are a lot of information in here from, you know, the percentage of time that you won the buy box and your revenue, total profit ROI, average wind price, and things like that. So a lot of really great info. And one thing that I just noticed that I think is really important for us to touch on, because I think most repricers don’t have, it is the ability to set a product as small and light, and then it calculates it on the correct fees for the small and light program. I think that is killer. Having that to be able to actually reprice on those rights setting. I mean, when it comes,
ian (44:01):
It’s both a re pricing. We can look at it both from repricing and analytics, because if I’m looking at my, if I’m calculating my profit based on a higher fee, but profit is going to come out smaller and I don’t have as good of an idea of my cashflow and that can be a problem in itself. And then from the repricing standpoint, is that if I’m looking at all of those kind of you call them post-sale costs, you know, those variable, Amazon fees, VA fees referral fees, things like that. If those are inflated as well, that means I would unintentionally and flight my men price, or I could unintentionally keep that minimum markup. And that would also make me a bit less competitive in certain, in certain situations. So it is definitely a really important thing to keep an eye on.
todd (44:54):
Yup, yup. Big time. And you guys have that in there. Like I said, I don’t know if anybody else does, if for anybody that isn’t familiar with small and light, it’s a program in Amazon. So if you log into seller central, I think you go to programs and then seller programs or something like that. But what it is is for products under $7 and add a decent sales velocity, you can actually get cheaper fees for referral fees and everything for Amazon, so that you can keep the price of that product below $7 and still make a good profit on it. Typically the shipping will be a little bit longer, like three to four days instead of the one to two days like Amazon promises. Although I’ve found a lot of times that it’s still gets there within the two days anyways. But I do a lot of that. I’ve got quite a few products down small and light program that works really well for me. And it’s awesome.
ian (45:52):
Yeah. And the smell, my prod program is great for a lot of sellers. And the main thing is that you want to make sure you don’t break that, that threshold, that upper threshold set by Amazon will get automatically reenrolled. And then if you drop below that price again, you have the chance of having those fees be at the, at that higher rate. So that’s also something that we want to take into account when setting our max prices.
todd (46:18):
Yup. Yup. Absolutely. Make sure it doesn’t go above that $7 Mark. It used to be, I think $14 dollars I believe, but then Amazon changed it down to $7.
ian (46:29):
Yeah. And if there’s bound to be more change that, and again, that is that’s why utilizing sellersnaps in terms of staying up to date with your, with your fees, because we pull those fees directly from Amazon, anytime that a referral fee changes, we’ll update that on the listing level and you’re able to see how that affects your markup.
todd (46:53):
Sure. So here’s another thing and it may not be possible because I’ve never seen any repricer yet that is able to reprice the business by box. Are you guys familiar with that? is that not even in the Amazon API possibility?
ian (47:13):
The business buy box is a big complicated business. Pricing is something that actually as of this week it’s available on the platform. we did what we call a soft launch. So we have it told Everybody about it. It is available to everybody. But if you go to your store settings and you go to the repricing stab, you’ll be able to see that there is a toggle to turn on business pricing. And then what you can do from there is you will be able to set a quantity discount, or be able to set a business price discount, and then quantity discounts up to that. After that up to five years. And from there, it will put you in a, in a space where you can compete on business pricing.
todd (48:06):
Okay, nice. Yep. I just looked in there and it is there for me, so I will have to play with that what I’ve been doing for now. And for anybody who doesn’t have that, or isn’t using seller snap. Cause I go, like I said, most reprices don’t have it is, I’ve just been using you guys to reprice the main buy box.
todd (48:25):
And then in Amazon’s repricer, I use Amazon’s repricer to price the business, buy box 1% lower than the normal buy box. And that’s actually a really cool trick that I learned. I think it might’ve been from Scot needis at buy box or might’ve mentioned that but really cool trick that helps you kind of feel the buy box for business customers and things, but have been able to do it in your guys’ software will be even better because I’m sure you’ll have a lot more options than what Amazon’s repricer has.
ian (48:59):
Yeah. And you know it’s going to work in a similar way. Like you said, reprice a percentage point below the actual price. So we are still going to be connected to that listed price as we go up and down. But yeah that’s generally going to be the way that it works and give it a try out and let us out, let us know how it goes for sure.
todd (49:24):
I will definitely do that. Alright, Ian, I think we’ve covered pretty much everything here. I wanted to dimension that you guys are giving our listeners a 30% off their first month, if they decide to sign up with you guys and they can get that discount by going to amazonseller.school/snap S N A P, and that will redirect them over to your guys’ website and include that discount on there. So that’s really awesome. Appreciate that. I think currently as the recording of this, your guys’s first price level is at $250, is that correct? Yeah. So the $250 is our accelerator program. And basically there is a very short application process where we are, you know, really investing in growing Amazon sellers by giving them a premium repricing solution at a severely discounted, a discounted rate. And it’s program that goes on for six
ian (50:28):
Months. So we guarantee that rate for six months and hopes and helping customers build up to be able to afford some of the other tiers, which are $500 and $800 price points. And so you can read all about the accelerator program@sellersnap.io and check out our pricing page. And then we’ll talk about all the ins and outs of the accelerator program, our standard package and our premium tier as well.
todd (50:54):
Yeah, for sure. And I can hear some of the people out there, like $250, are you crazy? Bqool. It’s like 25, Amazon’s free. And you know, regardless of everything we’ve already talked about about why you guys are better. And there’s a reason that I found out from you guys from sellers who are bigger than me, right? You use the tools that give you the competitive advantage and that’s what you guys are doing over a lot of the other repricers
ian (51:21):
That are out there, right? If you can get that competitive advantage. And also if you could save some time, because all you have to do is set your mins and maxes and turn it on, you don’t have to put it with the repricing rules. You know, you gotta look at the different value, the value points from the repricing standpoint, time saving standpoint, and also the additional insights that you can get from all the different data points that seller snap offers.
todd (51:46):
Sure. Yep. I agree. A hundred percent. So amazonseller.school/snap, you guys can get your 30% off your first month and check it out. And if you’re already using a repricer, you know, hopefully you can be in a better situation than I was when I made the switch of COVID hitting and then everything going haywire. You’ll be able to get, you know, a better AB test and switch from your current pricer test out seller snap for a month and just see the difference that it makes and see if it makes sense for you think it would be a good way for people to go forward.
ian (52:21):
Absolutely. You know, come out, we do have the free 15 day trial, you know, there’s no credit card down, no commitment. And at the end of the day, you know, it’s all about trying out the, trying out the different softwares and trying to figure out, you know, what piece to the puzzle you need to, to support your business.
todd (52:45):
All right. Well, Ian, I really appreciate you guys coming on the show and I appreciate you guys making seller snap. I really like it a lot. So again, thank you very much.
ian (52:56):
Thank you, Todd. Thank you for your time as well. And you know, being such a great customer and this was really fun. I hope to do it again soon.
todd (53:04):
Have a great one Ian.
todd (53:06):
Alright, so there you go. Thank you so much for making it this far in the episode. I hope you enjoyed all that great information, that great conversation we just had with Ian, a lot of good information there. I think hopefully you learned something. If you did, please like share and comment on video, give it a thumbs up. You’re over there on YouTube and hit that subscribe button down below to get more information and other great content, just like this. Really be helpful. Show notes, amazonseller.school/slash 45. And to get your 30% off your first month and that 15 day free trial. Remember amazonseller.school/snap, S N A P to check that out. And with that, that wraps up this episode. I’m your host, Todd Welch signing out happy selling everybody.
ammouncer (54:06):
This has been another episode of the Amazon Seller School podcast. Thanks for listening fellow entrepreneur and always remember success is yours. If you take it.
