With BlackFriday right around the corner there are some important strategic moves you may want to focus on in order to have a successful BlackFriday sales season, and set your store up for a great upcoming year.
Your BlackFriday Repricing on Amazon Strategy is a technique that can be applied throughout the year, not only during the holiday season.
Adobe Analytics reported that 2018 BlackFriday sales raked in about $6.22 millions in online sales, the highest ever witnessed, with Amazon grossing the chunk of it. This makes sense considering how much effort, energy and marketing Amazon throws behind this massive shopping day. Your BlackFriday Repricing on Amazon Strategy can be of more value to you and your store than your regular day to day repricing. .
On BlackFridays, pricing moves by competitors are always fierce – it’s a street fight. You do not have the luxury to stick to your ‘less $x from least competitors’ price rule’ repricing strategy. With multiples of products to push at a good profit margin you need to create a strong repricing.
Setting the Best Repricing Strategy for BlackFriday Shopping Spree
BlackFriday Pricing Based on Competitors’ Pricing Behavior (not Just the Lowest Price)
BlackFridays are usually characterized by sellers who are aggressively competing for the Amazon BuyBox. Sellers will try to come up with the most competitive pricing they can, but you do not want to just blindly lower your prices in order to stay in the game. By just lowering your prices you will inevitably end up in the dreaded ‘price war’ where you either end up losing the buy box or sacrificing most of your profit margin. In order to avoid this ‘price war’ you can take a more strategic approach that would take your competitor’s overall behavior into consideration and use it to outsmart them.
An example of this more strategic approach would be when a competitor is exhibiting behavior that shows they’re trying to match your price, instead of going on the offensive with a cuts in your price, you could increase your price, and stay put at that price. You will end up sharing the buy box with such a competitor at a higher price. Any other approach in such a situation will cost you the buy box or lead to sharing it at a lower price.
In order to monitor your competitors’ pricing behavior for multiple products you need a little more than elbow grease. Your best option is to use a repricing tool. Leading sellers use Amazon Repricing tools to achieve this. A survey done by BigCommerce reports that “60% of high-grossing Amazon sellers (with revenue of $2.5M – $10M) use one (repricer), which is a good indicator of their importance”.
Monitoring your competitors’ prices is one way to use your repricer, and in cases where you have a very aggressive competitor who is using the ‘less, say $0.05 from the lowest FBA price’ pricing approach to match the lowest FBA price. Your algorithmic repricing tool like SellerSnap, is able to quickly detect this behavior and adjust your prices accordingly.
Using its A.I capability, SellerSnap mirrors the competitor’s behavior in cases like these and reduces your price automatically until it reaches a reset point and then goes back to the maximum while your competitor raises their price or runs out of stock. This cycle eventually allows you to hold greater shares of the BuyBox (although you might lose some in the waiting window) at a higher profit margin.
Take a Repricing Clue from Your Inventory and Sales Data
Things happen fast on BlackFriday, but you cannot forget to look into your inventory and sales analytics data during this hectic time. You can uncover valuable insights from this data to reprice your products for more sales and maximum profit. Tools like SellerSnap automatically collects this data, uses a business intelligence algorithm to interpret it, and give you actionable insights on each SKU, in real-time.
For instance, in a case where a new SKU on your FBA listings gets massive sales just as it hits the warehouse, you might need to check that you’re not pricing too low. An excellent repricing tool with a robust analytics system will help make sure you don’t miss out on the perfect opportunities to maximize your profits.
Reprice to Win the War, Not the Battle
The euphoria that comes with BlackFriday lasts more than just that one glorious Friday. The day before and the day after BlackFriday are known to produce tremendous sales opportunities as well as BlacFriday. A lot of fast-selling products will be out of stock the day after BlackFriday with itching buyers. So, you don’t have to race yourself to the bottom.
BlackFriday comes with undoubtedly massive sales opportunities as well as an equivalent amount of madness. This can create a sort of ‘blinders on’ selling experience, where the short-term is all that the seller can think about. So, while repricing on BlackFriday, take a chill pill and optimize for both short and long-term. With the rising FBA fixed costs, protecting your margins is just as crucial as making quick competitive sales.
You should map out which of your products you will optimize pricing for in the long-term and those for the short-term. SellerSnap allows you to take control of your repricing strategy using either its A.I repricing feature and allowing the A.I to run on its own with your min and max prices or you can use the rule-based repricing feature to fine-tune individual listings to achieve your set business goals.
