Amazon Automate Pricing or an external repricer: the differences

What Amazon Automate Pricing is

Amazon has its own tool to update prices automatically. It's called Automate Pricing and you'll find it in the Pricing section of Seller Central. It's included at no extra cost in the Professional selling plan, and it works on products for which you have an active offer.

The idea is simple. You create a rule, choose its parameters and pick the SKUs it applies to, one at a time or in bulk. The rule only covers the products you select, not your whole catalogue. You can pause or change it whenever you want.

For each product you set a minimum price: it's your safety net, and the tool never goes below it.

The rules you can use

Amazon's rules fall into three families.

• Competitive price rules: they use the Featured Offer (the Buy Box), the lowest price on Amazon or the lowest external price as a reference, and position you against it
• Sales-based rules: they change your price based on how many units you sell over a given period
• Business price and quantity discount rules: they update your Amazon Business price when your standard price changes

The strengths of Amazon's tool

If you have few products, calm competition and “match the Buy Box” is all you need, it may be enough. Trying it costs nothing.

• It costs nothing extra: if you're on the Professional plan, you already have it
• It lives inside Seller Central: nothing to connect, nothing to set up outside Amazon
• It's reasonably fast: according to Amazon, with an existing rule updates usually take under 15 minutes, and up to an hour when you create or change a rule
• It keeps a 30-day history you can compare with your sales reports

Where a fixed rule may fall short

A rule is just that, a rule: given a reference, it puts you above, below or at the same price. That works well while the market is simple. It gets tight when the situation calls for some thinking before moving.

Take an example. You sell a blender at €59.90 and hold the Buy Box. A new seller with few ratings lists the same blender at €58.50. A rule that follows the lowest price drops you below them straight away. But you might have kept the Buy Box anyway, and now you're giving away margin on every sale.

These are the situations where it's worth asking whether a fixed rule is enough:

• You already hold the Buy Box: lowering further brings no extra sales, it only takes margin away
• A competitor uses rules similar to yours: you risk chasing each other down to both your minimums
• The market opens up, for example because a competitor runs out of stock: you need something that tries to climb back and steps back if the Buy Box is lost
• Not every competitor matters: a used offer, a low-rated seller or Amazon itself may call for different behaviour
• You have hundreds of products and want minimums calculated from cost, not typed in one by one
• You sell in several countries, and each marketplace has its own competitors and prices

How to win the Buy Box

What changes with an external repricer

An external repricer is software that connects to your account through the authorization you grant from Seller Central, via the Selling Partner API: the official interface Amazon provides precisely for this. It never receives your password and you can revoke access whenever you want.

The main difference isn't speed, it's how decisions are made. Besides rules, many repricers offer algorithmic strategies: they look at who holds the Buy Box, whether you already do, how much room there is below the competitor and what kind of offer you're up against. The goal is to win the Buy Box at the highest possible price, not simply to undercut everyone.

The flip side is that you pay for it, usually with a monthly subscription tied to the number of products. So the right question is: is the margin you recover worth more than the subscription?

Amazon repricer: what it is and how it works

How to choose: the questions to ask yourself

The most honest way to answer is to test. Take a representative group of products, run it for a few weeks with one tool, then with the other, and compare sales and margin.

• How many of your products share the page with other sellers? If only a few, start with Amazon's tool
• How often do prices change in your category? If several times a day, the quality of decisions matters more than simplicity
• Are there competitors you want to ignore, or treat differently?
• Do you win the Buy Box at a lower price than needed and stay there for days?
• Do you sell on several European marketplaces, or to companies on Amazon Business with B2B prices that follow a market of their own?
• How much margin do you lose today to pointless price cuts, compared with the cost of a subscription?

Can you use both?

Yes, but not on the same product. If two systems change the price of the same SKU, they overwrite each other and you can no longer tell who decided what.

The solution is to split: some SKUs on Amazon's rules, others on the repricer. Before handing a product to an external repricer, pause the Amazon rule on that product, and vice versa.

How Mossap helps

Mossap is an Amazon repricer built for European sellers. Here's how it answers the points above.

• Algorithmic, preconfigured or fully customizable strategies
• It can avoid lowering your price when you already hold the Buy Box, and cap how far you go below whoever holds it
• Upward price probe: it looks for the highest price the Buy Box will hold and steps back at once if it's lost
• Competitor filters by condition, fulfilment type and rating, and the choice whether to compete with Amazon
• A minimum and maximum price for each product, also with formulas on product cost, shipping, percentages or fixed values
• Prevents a merchant-fulfilled offer from going below the same FBA offer
• 10 European marketplaces included in every plan, and an Amazon Business channel that reprices B2B prices against other business offers without touching the consumer price
• Connects through the official authorization from Seller Central, a 14-day free trial with no credit card, plans from € 49.00 per month + VAT with an annual subscription

How the upward price probe worksAmazon Business repricingPlan pricing

In short

Amazon's tool is free, convenient and suited to small catalogues with simple rules. An external repricer costs a subscription, but it reasons about the situation instead of applying a fixed formula: it pays off when you have many products, competition moves often and every pointless price cut weighs on your margin. Either way, the starting point is the same: a well-calculated minimum price.