Podcast Episode 047 : How an Automatic Repricer Literally Doubled My Amazon Sales

To remain competitive in the Amazon marketplace, it is imperative that you are constantly reassessing the pricing of your inventory. While some Amazon sellers choose to adjust their prices manually from time to time, Amazon sellers who are focused on achieving long-term success would rather rely on an automatic repricer to update their prices to remain competitive. The success of an automatic repricer depends solely on correctly setting up the right repricing rules.

In this episode, Stephen and Rebecca weigh the pros and cons of a free repricing option like Amazon’s Automate Pricing tool, and Stephen shares why the tool he recommends is a paid tool called BQool. He also has some great tips and tricks for optimizing prices and has a free podcast perk for listeners, so make sure not to miss this episode!

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Key points from episode 47:

• Manual versus automatic repricing.
• How an automatic repricer saves time.
• If you’re not competitively pricing your inventory, you’re missing out on profits!
• Who should be using an automatic repricer?
• Free automatic repricing options and some pros and cons.
• Four reasons why Stephen recommends BQool as his repricer of choice.
• How customizable repricing rules are a game-changer.
• How BQool syncs with InventoryLab so that you don’t have to reenter information.
• The profit calculator for each pricing option in BQool which tells you your profit after fees.
• Why Stephen and Rebecca’s profits didn’t tank when their sales doubled.
• And more!

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• How to Manually Reprice Your Amazon FBA Inventory
• Amazon’s Automate Pricing Tool Review
• BQool – 2-week free trial
• BQool Review
• Contact me here if you sign up for a BQool 2-week free trial, and I’ll send you my personal repricing rules that doubled my inventory.
• InventoryLab – 30 day free trial
• InventoryLab Review
• InventoryLab Webinar and Bonus Offer
• Scoutify

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Episode 47 Transcript:

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:01.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Full-Time FBA Show. In each episode, it’s our goal to help you turn part time hours into a full-time income, selling almost anything on Amazon. Now, your hosts of the show, Stephen and Rebecca Smotherman.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:21.2] STEPHEN: Welcome to episode number 47 of The Full-Time FBA show. We have a show that could potentially help you increase your sales, maybe even double your sales, because that’s the topic of our show. How my sales literally doubled by adding an automatic repricer. We’re going to talk about what automatic repricers are, the one I recommend, some tips and I’ll even possibly give you my own repricing rules. To talk with me about this today is Rebecca, how’s it going?

[0:00:48.3] REBECCA: It’s going great, I’m really glad that we’re covering this because repricers are a topic that we avoided for so long in our FBA business, and we regret that.

[0:00:58.4] STEPHEN: Yeah, I think this was one of the tools that most top Amazon sellers use, and we’re just like, “I can manually do it, it’s not a big deal,” you know. I was used to mainly repricing and I didn’t realize just what I was missing out on and so we’re going to break it down today, talking about automatic repricers.

[0:01:21.6] REBECCA: All right, we’ve already kind of touched on that there’s different ways that you can reprice, there’s manual repricing and automatic repricing. Like I said, for the longest time, we were manually repricing our inventory, which is good in some instances, but it also takes a lot of time. Talk to us for a second, Stephen, before we get into other parts of this podcast about what is an automatic repricer, what does it do?

[0:01:46.0] STEPHEN: An automatic repricer is a tool that you can use, that you connect to your Amazon account, that will go in and automatically change the prices of your products. You can go in and you can setup certain rules, you can setup a minimum price, the low price that you want your can to go, or the max price, the highest price you want your price of your products to go, and you could have it setup to automatically update. It could potentially be really good, depending on the repricer that you use.

As an Amazon FBA seller, I want to try to outsource as much as possible, and so for a long time, I was manually repricing. I was going to my inventory page, looking at my inventory, manually repricing my stuff, comparing it to the buy box, looking at my competition and, I mean, I was spending a lot of time doing that. In fact, I’ve even got some blog post teaching you how to manually reprice. If you want to manually reprice and don’t even know what I’m talking about, you can go to fulltimefba.com/manualrepricing and I’ll talk to you about how to do that.

But, when I started using an automatic repricer, it totally revolutionized my Amazon business.

[0:02:56.6] REBECCA: yeah, that was something I was spending a lot of time on too. I felt like that was just very time consuming towards the end of when we switched to automatic repricing. It can be a drain to a point where you just don’t even feel like doing it, and you could convince yourself that it’s not that important. But making sure that your inventory is priced optimally is a huge part of getting great sales on Amazon.

[0:03:21.3] STEPHEN: Yeah, if you are not making sure your prices are competitive, then you just have stale inventory for the most part, sitting in an Amazon warehouse and, you know, causing you to have way too many storage frees and, you know, you’re missing out on profits.

[0:03:36.2] REBECCA: Who should be using an automatic repricer, is this something that just every Amazon seller from the time you sign up should go out and get it? Or who do you recommend should be using these types of repricers?

[0:03:47.0] STEPHEN: I think for the most part, new Amazon sellers would be good to manually reprice for a while. I would say, once you get to like 50 skews, maybe at that point, maybe even 40 skews, think about starting to add an automatic repricer. But when you have like 40 or 50 skews, you know, you might be able to go in and update that. I mean, honestly, I wish I would have started from the very beginning but, as someone who likes to learn things the hard way first, and to learn how to appreciate outsourcing something by doing it first, I think it’s really good for us to immediately reprice for a short time before you finally jump into it.

If you’re looking for like a level 40 or 50 skews, once you eclipse that, I think it’s time to consider having a robot automatically reprice your inventory.

[0:04:34.0] REBECCA: Yeah, any more than that amount of skews and you’re just spending too much time on it. It’s very time-consuming to go in and check. All right, is there a free option for repricing using an automatic repricer?

[0:04:48.1] STEPHEN: Yeah, Amazon offers up a free program called Automate Pricing. We have a full review, pros and cons of it, fulltimefba.com/automatepricing and to give you a quick version of that pro and con. The pro, it’s free, you know? That’s awesome. Another pro is that it’s simple, there only seven questions that you need to answer or choose on how you want the repricer to be set up.

But the cons is that it is not reliable to reprice up. It will reprice down every day but, once you’re at the low price, even if your competitor is a higher priced, it’s not going to rise up to meet that competitor’s price or try to help you make more money. The Amazon repricer is setup to get more sales, and low prices get more sales. I think that to the fact that Automate Pricing is not consistent on raising your price, it’s something that I just want to stay away from.

I want to be able to make really good money. I have a really good data on why I choose the prices I want, and I just don’t trust Automate Pricing.

[0:05:57.9] REBECCA: So, what is the repricer that you would recommend?

[0:06:00.4] STEPHEN: There are several that are out there. The one that I have tried and used and found success with, and it actually doubled my sales the first month I used it. The tool is called BQool, that it spelled B-Q-O-O-L. BQool is what I use for my repricer.

[0:06:17.9] REBECCA: Tell us a little bit more about it. What do you like about it, what are some of the features?

[0:06:21.0] STEPHEN: There’s a lot I like about it, you can check out my full review, fulltimefba.com/bqoolreview, but I’ll tell you my top four reasons why I like BQool. Number one, you can customize your repricing rules specifically. I said before that Amazon has seven rules that you can setup. I went through earlier today, in fact, Rebecca was even calling me out on it, “Why is there like a notepad with all these hash marks all over it?”

I actually went through and counted all the ways BQool can be customized for your own personal repricing rules. There are 228, as of the time of recording, 228 different options that you can choose to set up your repricing rules. You know, that might seem really overwhelming, “Oh my gosh, what if I do something wrong?” Well, at the end of this podcast, I’ll give you a way that you can get my own personal repricing rules, you can copy my own repricing rules and know that it’s going to work for you. But you can customize things specifically, as like, “You know what? I want BQool to ignore any back ordered items. If my competition has back ordered items, I want you to ignore those prices. I want to focus on Amazon sellers who want their items that day or next day. I don’t want my price to get lowered by something that’s not even in stock yet. I want BQool to ignore just-launched sellers who might be pricing at a loss just to kind of get some feedback, or get some experience,” and I can even ignore Amazon sellers who have low feedback score.

You know, if I want to ignore feedback scores lower than 80%, I can do that and so – and even specific seller store names. If you have certain store names, you want to ignore repricing against them. You can do that and there’s a bunch of other different ways. Again, 228 ways that you can choose repricing rules. I found the formula has worked for me, that’s my number one reason why I like BQool, is the customizable repricing rules.

[0:08:17.5] REBECCA: Okay, that’s dedication to go through and count all those. I didn’t realize that’s what you’re doing. His whole piece of paper on his note pad was covered with these little hash marks and I was like, “What are you doing? It’s a lot of counting that you’re doing over there.”

[0:08:30.5] STEPHEN: Yeah, the cool thing about BQool is they continually update their options and so they get feedback from their other sellers, or other people using their system, and like, “What can we do in this situation? How can we – what happens if there is no buy box, and the buy box is suppressed, can we still reprice after that?” Yes, you can with this rule.

That’s reason number one, customizable repricing rules. The second thing I like about BQool is that it syncs with InventoryLab. If you’re an InventoryLab user, you’re going to love this because you know, when you buy stuff, if you’re doing retail arbitrage, and you’re using Scoutify, and you make it a buy list, or maybe you’re just doing online arbitrage or wholesale through InventoryLab’s system. You can have InventoryLab and BQool synced together so that your buy cost is pulled from InventoryLab into BQool, so you don’t have to reenter that information.

You might think okay, that’s not a big deal –

[0:09:26.3] REBECCA: Yes it is. That’s a huge deal.

[0:09:28.3] STEPHEN: It is, over time. It sounds like it’s not but it is a huge deal.

[0:09:31.0] REBECCA: It saves me a ton of time to be able to use that feature.

[0:09:33.8] STEPHEN: Exactly. It is just nice because, sometimes you might not remember. You don’t want to go back. You don’t want to do data entry that is not something that you know, you need to be doing to make the best use of your time. So InventoryLab syncs with BQool and then you can also, if you’ve got your minimum/maximum prices in InventoryLab, you can download that to a spreadsheet to upload to BQool to also sync that together.

So, that’s a big deal. We love InventoryLab. If you haven’t used InventoryLab yet, fulltimefba.com/inventorylab. You can try it free for a month and it’s cool. The third thing I like about BQool is that each pricing option has a profit calculator. So you can type in, “This is what I want my minimum price to be.” Well, you can click a button and you can see, after fees, what your profit will be at that minimum price, because maybe you might pick a minimum price that is going to cost you to lose money or break even, and you’re like, “No,I know I still want to make a certain ROI.”

Well, there is a profit calculator that, at one click, it will tell you what your profit is. You know you could do the same thing with the cost – the item that you’re going to price it at. You can see what your ROI would be, you could do that for your max price. There a profit calculator that helps you make better decisions. It helps you avoid making mistakes by pricing too low with your minimum cost that you are choosing.

Then the last thing that I like about BQool, that I am going to mention here, is that it’s always re-pricing. I actually use the cheapest BQool plan, the plan that is the lowest tier, and my inventory gets re-priced every 15 minutes. So that is 96 times a day, thank you calculator, 96 times a day that the BQool is going in and updating my prices. You can pay for a higher tiered that will to update your prices every five minutes, but it is always re-pricing, because prices are changing all the time on Amazon.

There’s new competitors coming in at certain prices, there is certain competitors that are selling out with other prices leaving. There is other competitors with repricers, so prices are changing all the time. You want to stay competitive, and since BQool has a minimum price, that you don’t want your price to go too low, it is not like you are going to lose out on ROI because you are going to be able to know for sure what your ROI is going to be, by being able to have a minimum price.

But BQool is always repricing and it is awesome and if you want to know the other reasons why I love BQool, fulltimefba.com/BQoolreview and again, BQool is spelled B-Q-O-O-L.

[0:12:05.8] REBECCA: And just on that last one, as you were saying that I am thinking, if you wanted to have it at the 5 minute re-pricing at that tier, that might be something to consider if you have faster selling inventory in Q4, that you have a lot in stock, and you’re wanting to be really competitive. That is when you would consider, “Oh do I need to have this re-pricing every 5 minutes as oppose to 15 minutes?” and you could really increase your sales that way.

[0:12:31.2] STEPHEN: Absolutely.

[0:12:32.2] REBECCA: So speaking of increasing your sales, you are saying that, after we started using BQool, our sales doubled. We all need to pay attention, know our numbers. As sellers, you need to know sales, profits, those are different.

So if our sales doubled, how did our profits – how are our profits impacted with that?

[0:12:54.4] STEPHEN: Yeah, I get a lot of messages and people asking me about this, because they’re saying, “Well of course your sales doubled. You know all the prices of your inventory tanked and you are able to sell it all, but that doesn’t last over time, does it?” My reply to that is that our sales prices did not tank. Our sales prices were optimized. If you go in and re-price your inventory manually, and you just do that once a week, you know, that’s a time when a lot can change when it comes to prices, and you miss out on opportunity.

You might see an item tank and being sold for $10 less a week from now but, if your re-pricer came in and re-priced it maybe lower by a quarter, you might have been able to get the very next sale, and you’ve made $9.75 more by having that price optimized.

[0:13:47.2] REBECCA: And you could have sold out by the time you even got around to re-pricing it manually.

[0:13:51.2] STEPHEN: Exactly, yes. It’s a snowball effect that begins to work overtime because you are selling your items faster, your items are optimized. The pricing is optimized to help you get the most money and BQool is also increasing your prices. There’s times when your competition sells out, and you’re the only lowest-priced seller at the moment, but there is a $4 gap between you and the second priced. Well, what if you are price rose up and was able to still be the lowest price but not as low as you were before?

You are able to save your price a couple of bucks, you are making more money. That happens a lot. Since you are selling your items faster, you are able to get paid faster, which helps you reinvest that capital into more inventory faster, which begins to snowball your sales. And so, while our sales doubled, our profits continue to increase overtime, over long periods of time, and again, we saw these sales double and we saw the profits that we are able to bring in and reinvest into more inventory.

And we’re like, “Why did we not do this sooner? What is wrong with us?” like you know, we were just being stubborn. It was just one more thing we didn’t want to learn, which is why I came up with this offer for you to get the free re-pricing rules. I’ll tell you how to do that. If you go to fulltimefba.com/BQool and sign up through that link. Sign up for a two week free trial then send me a message.

Go to fulltimefba.com/contact to send me a message, and say, “I just signed up for a two week free trial with BQool,” or maybe if you are already sold, you can sign up for a monthly membership, or a yearly subscription, and tell me that you did that. I will send you my personal re-pricing rules that did double our sales in the first month using it, and you will get, you know, my assistant will email you exactly the rules that we use. All 228 different options, what we use in our own business that helped our sales and continually help our sales overtime.

You do that during your two week free trial and, after two weeks, you are going to be like, “Stephen was right, this is awesome. I am signing up for the long term,” so do that. The pricing rules are free during your free two week trial, so you have nothing to worry about. It is something that will impact your business and it is an awesome way also to prepare for Q4, when you want to make sure you are spending as much time as you can sourcing, to be able to have that inventory at Amazon. You don’t want to waste your time re-pricing manually.

[0:16:28.3] REBECCA: And you want to be sure if you do get that free trial, be sure that when you sign up, you are ready to sit down and start setting up the repricer and using those rules right away. Don’t sign up for a free trial and then forget to use it. That’s my big pet peeve with free trials is, if I forget to use it, I’m like, “Oh man, I just blew my trial. Now I have got to pay for a month and not be sure if I actually like it or not.” So it is really great that you can use this free trial and also get the repricer rules for free at the same time.

Again, if you want to see all of that written out that Stephen just said, if you are not able if you are driving or doing whatever you’re doing right now and you are not able to write that down, be sure and go to the show notes of this episode, where we will have it all spelled out for you. Again, all the links and instructions for how to do all of the things that we just talked about with signing up and getting the rules, you can get that at the show notes at fulltimefba.com/47, the number 47 because this is episode number 47.

[0:17:25.8] STEPHEN: 47.

[0:17:28.5] REBECCA: Nice.

[0:17:29.9] STEPHEN: I am trying to find a way to make it memorable, you know 47-47-47.

[0:17:34.0] REBECCA: Okay, musical transition.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:17:39.2] REBECCA: All right, well that’s all that we have for you today. We’re so glad that you joined us and we are looking forward to seeing you again next week, or not seeing you I guess, since it is a podcast, but you know what I mean. Next week, we are going to talk about how to have a profitable Halloween.

[0:17:54.9] STEPHEN: Ooh, spooky.

[0:17:55.6] REBECCA: Yeah, it’s very spooky.

[0:17:57.3] STEPHEN: Yes, but we are going to make some spooky good profits in Halloween, so we are going to talk you through what you need to do to make that happen. We’ll have some fun doing it. So, have a great day everybody, God bless.

[OUTRO]

[0:18:10.2] ANNOUNCER: That is all for this episode of The Full-Time FBA Show. So head over to fulltimefba.com/podcast, where you will find the show notes and links from this episode. While you’re there, subscribe to our newsletter where you’ll get several free downloads of our popular and helpful Amazon FBA resources. Now, take action on what you have learned today so you can find success at turning part-time hours into a full-time income with Amazon FBA.

[END]