Did you miss out on any marketplace sales over the holiday season because you were undercut on price? 

Pricing wars on marketplaces can make or break a business and, oftentimes, can feel like a race to the bottom — which can be brutal on your already-thin margins.

For many sellers, an algorithmic repricer is a great tool to use to help boost buy box wins and maintain maximum profit. But in some instances, an algorithmic repricer alone isn’t enough. Or even the best repricing strategy to use. 

For example, most brands set minimum advertised price (MAP) guidelines on their products to maintain the integrity of their brand across their network of retailers. And if the brand also sells direct to consumers, they need to operate within these same MAP requirements.

But in some cases, a particular brand — depending on the nature of their product line — might not have wide enough profit margins to justify algorithmic repricing.

Enter velocity repricing. 

Velocity repricing allows you to automatically adjust product prices based on your business goals. Perhaps your goal is to move some of the excess, stale inventory in your warehouse. In that case, velocity pricing could adjust prices to move more products in less time. Or your goal could be to react more strategically to supply and demand trends — extracting more margin from fast-selling products and lowering prices when sales are slow. 

Rithum recently worked with one such brand on velocity repricing strategies with great results. 

Tactical apparel brand increases velocity

This apparel brand had experienced a couple of months of stagnant revenue growth as a third-party seller on eBay and Walmart. 

Rithum suggested using velocity repricing to shake things up. The results were significant. Over a period of three months using velocity repricing on a select subset of products, from August through October, compared to the three months prior without repricing, they saw:

  • 149% revenue growth across eBay and Walmart
  • 76% increase in # of products sold

This revenue boost during the summer and fall months did more than just increase short-term profits. It allowed the company to deploy an even bigger ad budget during the holiday shopping season, join the Best Deals program on Walmart, leverage Promoted Listings on eBay, purchase more ads and, ultimately, see even greater revenue. 

The results gave them the ability to hit the ground running in 2020 — with new insights into ad effectiveness and pricing strategies and more revenue to invest in new programs, new channels and new products.