No matter if you have one hundred, one thousand, or even ten thousand items in your Amazon inventory, having your items priced competitively is one of the best ways to increase profits. No matter how long your inventory has been sitting in an Amazon warehouse, it’s very likely that new competition has come into the picture. Once you learn how to reprice your inventory, then it’s time to put that knowledge to work for you. Today I want to teach you my 6 most profitable strategies for repricing inventory.
1. Reprice “old” inventory – The items that have been sitting in a FBA warehouse the longest are most likely the items not priced competitively. I started selling on Amazon in 2011, and thankfully, all of the inventory I sent in from 2011 to 2018 has sold. One reason is because I regularly reprice the items that have been in my inventory the longest. To sort your inventory to show you what’s been there the longest, simply click on the “Date Created” column. To sort from oldest to newest, just click on the little triangle under the “Date Created” text. This will show you the items that have been there the longest (The only instance where this is not the case is for the items in your inventory that you consistently replenish). Look through your oldest inventory and price competitively.
2. Reprice “high quantity” inventory – This one always gives me a big boost in my number of sales and helps me avoid potential long term storage fees. Sort your inventory by clicking on the “available” column. Click on the little triangle under the word “available” to sort that column from most to least. Currently, the item I have the most inventory for has 47 items and a great rank. I’m only a few dollars above the lowest FBA price, so if I competitively reprice that item, then I’ll see an immediate boost in sales. Remember, after your inventory has been in an Amazon warehouse for over 12 months, Amazon will charge you a long term storage fee for these items. This long term storage fee is $22.50 per cubic foot, so it’s a fee you definitely want to avoid at all costs.
3. Reprice “high priced” inventory – This one is my favorite, because it usually brings me high dollar profits fast! Sort your inventory by price by clicking on the “Your Price” column. Again, click on the little triangle to sort your price from highest to lowest. Most of the time, my price is still very close to the current low FBA price, but other times, my price is way above the current low FBA price. I do the necessary research and price competitively. Almost as soon as I reprice my high priced items, I get sales. Of course, not all of my high-priced inventory sells out, but the increase in sales of high priced items definitely increases my net payout for that payment cycle.
4. Reprice “newest” inventory – If you have items that sell immediately after they arrive at a FBA warehouse, you may want to make sure that your price is optimized for maximum profit. Just last month I sent in five Elsa dolls to FBA. In the first few hours after arriving I had already sold two at $49.99. I quickly went in and saw that not only was I selling at the lowest FBA price, but the next highest price was $64.99. I immediately raised my price to $64.99 and by the end of the day, I sold out. If I had not been aware of my sales, or if I did not reprice these items fast enough, then I would have missed out on more profit.
5. Reprice “expiring” items – If you sell grocery items or other items that come with an expiration date, then it’s a good idea to reprice any inventory that might be getting close to Amazon’s cut off dates for expiration. Remember, Amazon’s expiration date guidelines state that any items within 50 days of expiring will be removed for disposal by Amazon. If you have any items nearing the 50 day mark, it would be wise to reprice your item to sell ASAP.
6. Reprice “seasonal” inventory – This is a strategy that I employ the least, but if your business model is more focused on fast nickels (AKA fast turns), then this strategy will bring back some capital for you to invest in other more fast-turning items. There is no way to sort seasonal inventory by columns, so you’ll need to do key word searches on your inventory page. Keywords like Christmas, Easter, Summer, Winter, etc will help you find most of your seasonal items. You also might want to scroll through your active inventory to see if you find any other seasonal items that these keywords overlook. My business model is more of a well-balanced model as I want to include both fast nickels and slow dimes. I’m ok with waiting a few months for price and demand to rise up to where my current prices are for Summer items. But if you’d rather have that capital back ASAP to invest elsewhere, then this strategy will work great for you.
When it comes to pricing you inventory, think about these factors: the price I paid for the item, prices of FBA competition, current sales rank, sales rank history, and pricing history. I even listen to what my intuition tells me when I price my items. After doing this for so long, I’ve started to get a feeling of how to best price my items. My main goal is to price items competitively. Sometimes I want to be the lowest FBA price and sometimes I want to match the lowest FBA price. Other times I price my items above the current low price, because I think I can get more for my items eventually. Most of the time, I use the Keepa graphs to help me price well. It’s a detailed process, and that’s a simple summary of the main points.
As always, there will be exceptions to these repricing strategies, but overall, they should help you sell more items and get more capital back into your pocket than if you had left the prices alone.
So what about you? What pricing strategies do you like best? Any strategies you use that I don’t? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Why reprice manually when you can automate repricing?
Manually repricing is great when you have lower inventory levels and can handle repricing from time to time, but once your inventory levels start to get larger, you might want to consider using an automatic repricer like BQool.
We started using the BQool automatic repricer service in September of 2018, and now we wonder how we ever ran our Amazon business without it.
If you’re wondering how well BQool works, just know that for the first month of using Bqool, our sales literally doubled. Not only that, but BQool syncs with our InventoryLab account and automatically imports my buy costs. This is a huge time saver.
For a 2-week free trial of Bqool, click here.
Free BQool Bonus – If you sign up for BQool via the link above, then I’ll send you my own personal BQool repricer settings that helped me double my sales the first month of using it. Just contact me from the same email you used to sign up for BQool (so I can verify your free trial) and once verified, I’ll send you my personal BQool repricer settings.
*Post updated for 2019
Excellent insights on re-pricing. Thanks
Happy to help!
Hi
My problem, probably like many other FBA sellers, is finding products that will actually turn a profit. Every product I look at the initial figures seem ok but by the time I research deeper the profit margin virtually disappears due to private labelling cost, courier cost, printed insert cost, Amazon FBA cost etc. Am I being paranoid or am I missing something?
Terry Rainey
Terry, It can be hard to find some items with a high enough profit margin to make it worth selling online… but keep looking. Those items are out there and you can find them.
Thanks for the info and reminder Stephen. Read your blog post – went to AZ and did some quick repricing – immediately started getting sales on some of those items!
Great news, Kathleen!! I love hearing that.
Just wanted to let you know that I employed a few of your repricing strategies this week and sold 7 “stagnant” items in a 24 hour period! I may not of made as much profit on them, but at least they are out of my inventory now! Thanks so much for your willingness to share your expertise with all of us!
That’s so awesome, Lisa! Yes, sometimes just getting your capital back is the best idea so that you can use it on items that will return a profit much faster!
Stephen, thank you for your posts. My sister and I started our FBA business just about two months ago, and you are a “go-to” person for us. When you mention an item or items have been sitting in the warehouse a while, what constitutes “a while?” Of course we want stuff to fly off the shelves immediately, but as a newbie, I’m not sure what to expect for a decent stocking to selling time period.
That’s a good question, Kelly… for me, an item that has been sitting in the warehouse “a while” would be over 6 months.
This was SUPER helpful…thanks!!!
You’re welcome!
Great article! Quickie question to confirm my understanding: Say I send in several of the same ASIN and sell most, leaving one piece at one of AZ’s warehouses and one at another warehouse at the time the 365 days are up, and it’s Aug or Feb. In this situation, does AZ consider that I have two pieces and charge me the long term fee, or do they make the determination on a per-location basis, thereby not charging me the fee? Thanks!
Great question, Denise! Amazon will see this as 2 ASINs in your inventory, and therefore charge you a long term storage fee for one of those ASINs. It’s not determined by if the items are in different warehouses, only how many you have in your inventory. Thanks for the question!
You prompted me to take a long overdue look at repricing my inventory. It took nearly all day to assess about 1500 unique items. Time well spent. About 90% of my inventory needed tweaking. Usually on a good day I sell about 6 items. Yesterday I sold 31. Thanks for the timely tip.
That’s great!
I have a question:
Will I send the items directely to Amazon Warehouse from the Store that I purchsed.
Thanks
Robert
You can sell on Amazon via Merchant Fulfilled (storing your own inventory and shipping the items that sell yourself) or sell on Amazon via FBA (sending your inventory to Amazon and having them store and ship your items when they sell). For more info, check out https://www.fulltimefba.com/arbitrage
I have shoes in my inventory for almost 3 months now and they are not selling. How should i price them? I have tried matching the lowest FBA and it is not working.
Shoes are many times a long tail item (they take longer to sell than many other categories) but the ROI is usually worth the wait. See our series on selling shoes here: https://www.fulltimefba.com/shoeseries. As for pricing, if you’re wanting to sell ASAP, then I’d try to be the best price in that size/variation. Sometimes it just takes time for the right customer to come along and find your shoes. Feel free to experiment with lowering the price and see if that will entice a customer. I wish you all the best!
Hi Stephen thanks for all the help, I unfortunately not an fba seller and barely
Started on eBay with about 40 listings. Little by little once I grow eBay and amazon merchant fulfill with about 30 listings than maybe I will do fba, not interested in fba anytime soon. That’s why I haven’t bought your ebook. I am working on getting out of debt and building capital for right now and barely making ends meet and praying and staying positive and not giving up, for I have a child with special needs to take care of. Thank you again and have a blessed day,katy
I just want to say “Thank You”. I am so incredibly grateful I have found you and I appreciate all of the knowledge you share. I have been on eBay since 2000 and I started FBA last year but pulled all my inventory because I panicked about the long term storage fees. So I am giving it another go. I hope with your help I will be able to figure things out. Thanks again. ~Rose
Hi Stephen, I have just recently found you and enjoy reading your posts. However, #2 above needs to be adjusted— the last couple of sentences no longer apply.
I like to pull aged inventory reports– then I make separate lists for each range and work though the oldest ones first.. I especially do this a couple months before the LTSF hit… then I keep a watch right up till the day of fees and decide what to bring back , have destroyed or take the hit on the fee as sometimes that is less than the other options and if it’s ranked well or little competition I will just take the hit.
Thanks for reminding me to update the post since the guidelines have changed. The post is now up to date.
I would like to know how often you look at repricing your inventory.
And I really enjoy reading your very helpful posts.
Thank you
I look at repricing about every other month or so.
Hi.
I have some items with the lowest price but they are stagnated for some time. What would you recommend?
Either lower the price some more… or try Amazon ads to drive more traffic to your item.
Hi Steve
I listed one of my items and i piggybacked from a asin number from another seller, I only have a few of the items so thats why I just piggy backed.
I got a email from amazon saying some one reported me for selling counter fit product witch it not, I think it was the guy I piggy backed from who is selling the same thing. Amazon deactivated the Item whaT do i do its not fair.
Tim
What do you mean “piggybacked?” I want to be sure I understand you before I answer your question.
Hi Stephen… thanks so much for your great content! You’re a breath of fresh air in this online world of coaching on purpose! I love this post because this past weekend I was faced with the same questions of how to get some of my stagnant inventory moving. After I adjusted my pricing, I increased my sales by about 30% — woohoo!!! What I’m trying to decide now that my inventory is moving and I have found “the sweet spot” for these products to sell. Should I go back and restock those products again, or do I just walk away and get other, more profitable items? I have what you like to call a lot of the fast moving nickles in my inventory and some slow moving dimes – it’s about a 70/30 split – 70% are the fast nickles, but not any quarters yet 🙂 )… so I’m wondering now that they’re moving a lot faster, should I buy those products again and continue to sell them at a much lower price (and lower profit), but higher volume in sales, or just move on to something else that may make me more profit? I know there are no right or wrong answers, but I’m just curious, what you would do in this case, cut your losses and move on (to possibly a few quarters every now and then), or continue working the low priced nickels? Thanks a ton for your information, it really has helped me become a more confident and smarter seller with Amazon. You’re Da’ Bomb!! 🙂
I say that if you can continue to sell them at a profit… that profit is profit! It doesn’t matter if the ROI is lower than before, it’s still a profit. In fact, part of really finding long term success in this business is to sell in higher volumes… so keep it up!
Thanks for the info – so on another note – do you recommend using repricer software? If so, any recommendations?
Stephen, how do deal with scenarios where you priced competitively at the start, but then other sellers jump on the listing well below the other FBA sellers’ (including my) price. How do we know if we should price match? or just wait it out?
Look at the pricing history on Keepa to see what you should expect. Then with that info, you can choose to hold your price, or lower your price to get the sale (and get your capital back). Find out how to use Keepa here: https://www.fulltimefba.com/readkeepa
Thank you for the information. We are new at this and learning each day. We went back in and adjusted some prices and sold items.
That’s awesome! Glad to hear you taking action and seeing immediate results!
Thank you soo much for sharing this,
I also use the some method above mentioned your blog, its totally good and works, in my wholesale account almost 1800+ listing which i use he different techniques to get the good sale, some of them i use, you mentioned above. Its good knowledge for me too,
I am also using the method and my account revenue monthly $309k+ and $90k profit margin also…
Thank you again sharing the informative knowledge,
Happy to help!
Excellent ideas they sound obvious but sometimes it´s necesssary to remind them.
Just a question: what repricer do you use?
Txs
Laura
(from Madrid-Spain)
I use BQool… and here is my review of why I simply LOVE Bqool: https://www.fulltimefba.com/bqoolreview.