In the eCommerce world, you must stay competitive if you want to succeed. Otherwise, you will not survive. One of the ways for sellers to stay competitive is to have frequent price changes. Many online shops do this. For example, Target changes its prices on its app, whether users were shopping inside or outside a Target store. Also, Target changes the prices of its products depending on the location of the customer.     

Walmart uses dynamic pricing to change the prices of their products, and they do it approximately 50,000 times per month. Amazon also uses dynamic pricing, and they modify the prices of their products 2.5 million times a day, according to Business Insider.    

What do these three online marketplaces have in common? They do this process with a program. That puts them at an advantage over other stores that perform manual repricing. Here is why manual repricing is not worth it anymore.    

1- Not fast enough 

Amazon changes the prices of their products every 10 minutes, Business Insider claims. That is impossible for a human to do in a company as enormous as Amazon. So, manual repricing is not viable in eCommerce if you want to make a profit and increase your margins. You can continue to do it but know that you always will be behind your competitors in every aspect. 

2- You have many competitors 

All stores in the eCommerce world have competitors, no matter if they are big or small. And every day and every week, new competitors arise, apart from the one you already have. So, this list keeps getting bigger. To change the price of your products, you must check the product prices of your competitors. So, manually keeping track of them is impossible. 

3- A lot of products 

Another problem is the number of products you have in your portfolio and the number of products your competitors have. Checking their products, then yours, and updating the price takes a lot of time. When you do this manually, you leave the door open for competitors that use an automatic repricer to do this faster and more often. 

4- Human mistakes 

We are humans, and we make mistakes. We cannot do anything about that. When you are repricing manually, you are scrapping many websites and then adding that information to a spreadsheet. Having many tabs open increases the chances of making a mistake. Plug one number wrong, and the new pricing strategy goes to waste. Especially in the eCommerce world, errors like this one cost a lot of money, and in this fast-paced environment, human blunders are likely to happen.   

5- It is boring and monotonous 

Scanning the web for prices is not that fun when you do it manually. Just imagine looking, for example, at prices for the same model of helmet across 20 retailers every day. Then, you have to modify your pricing strategy after you have this data. Doing this every day turns out to be boring and the person in charge of this task will fill his job as monotonous. With an automated solution, this process is faster and more enjoyable for the person in charge. 

6- Not enough time 

As you know by now, price changes take a lot of time when you have many competitors and many products. Unfortunately, price changes don’t happen during working hours. They occur late at night, during midnight, or in the early hours. They happen at these times because the demand for products is low. That requires your company to have personnel at those times to change the prices of your products. And you know that is not going to happen.       

Price changes happen at any time. If your competitor makes a price change at midnight, you will have to wait a minimum of 6-7 hours to change your prices. By the time you do this, new price changes on the market occur. With a pricing program, you will not have this headache. 

Conclusion: 

Manual repricing brings a lot of problems to companies that sell online. Frequent price changes are vital to staying competitive in the eCommerce world. If you don’t have pricing software, you will have to build a team of pricing strategists who can work 24/7, track all your competitors, and reprice every product. Having that team turns out to be expensive for your company and prevents HR problems inside your company.    

The solution for this is to have a pricing program like PriceTweakers. We remove human mistakes, save your company money, and it will help you reprice your products at any time. Implementing an automated solution to keep your prices competitive will ultimately benefit your business. The idea is not to replace humans with software but to give them an instrument to make their jobs easier.   

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