How to reprice your Amazon inventory for free (no tools)

The lengths I have gone to to avoid using paid repricing tools are legendary (or should be). My persistence in manual repricing is part frugality, part disdain for most paid repricers, and part insanity. But I have repriced inventory levels in range of 10,000 SKUs entirely by hand (and sometimes paying virtual assistants to do it).

The point is: Over time, I developed a system to reprice by hand extremely efficiently. This can literally cut your repricing time down by half, if you understand and practice the steps below.

While I have since upgraded to a repricing tool that works for me, I have tremendous respect to those who refuse to give in and are repricing by hand. This is for you.

Warning: Repricing is not optional

Skip ahead if you don’t need this reminder:

Repricing is not optional.

If your inventory is not effectively repriced, it’s the same as that inventory not being for sale at all.

If you’ve been underpriced by multiple other sellers, then no one will see your offer. And if no one sees it, no one can buy it. In other words: It may as well not be for sale.

To put another way: You would be locked up in an insane asylum if you said something like:

“I haven’t been sourcing inventory lately. Gosh I can’t understand why I’m not getting sales.”

Yet for some reason it is consider totally normal for sellers to say:

“I haven’t repriced my inventory recently. Gosh I can’t understand why I’m not getting sales.”

They are two sides of the exact same coin.

Repricing is not optional.

Three reasons to reprice manually (without paid tools)

A lot of sellers think its crazy to reprice by hand. But there are several legitimate reasons to not automate repricing.

Here’s the list:

Reason #1: You have a small inventory

The #1 reason sellers cite for repricing by hand is having a small inventory. Which makes sense: Why pay for a repricer when repricing by hand only takes you a few minutes per day?

A lot of sellers ask the question: “When is my inventory big enough that I should upgrade to a paid repricing tool?” There’s no definitive answer, but above 100 SKUs you will start to feel the pain of repricing by hand. And when you get above 1,000, it get really challenging.

Reason #2: Repricing without tools is cheaper

When you run a small business, every dollar counts. And all those monthly subscription costs really add up. So a lot of sellers skip paying repricing tools as a cost-cutting measure.

The cheapest tool (RepriceIt) for the smallest inventory size is still $10 a month.

(I exhibit a level of frugality that might be considered mentally ill. So this one is very relatable to me).

Reason #3: It allows you to reprice with extreme precision

The best reason (in my opinion) to avoid paid repricers is the lack of precision. Most repricers have major blindspots that impact their ability to reprice with precision.

The two most costly blindspots are:

The “FBA blindspot” (repricers are prohibited by Amazon from seeing many FBA offers)
The “Bundle Blindspot” (preventing you from pricing against anything except the lowest price offer).

On top of all that, most repricers don’t let you reprice by Sales Rank or product category, etc. It’s a big mess.

And if you’re using Amazon’s free repricer, the blindspots get even worse.

All of these add up to significant losses, as they compound over time. Repricing by hand is the only way to reprice with total precision and maximize every penny from your inventory.

Repricing by hand: Overview

What we’re about to cover is not a boring set of instructions on how to edit and save your prices. That’s easy to figure out.

Instead, I’m getting very detailed into how to do it efficiently.

The key concepts to grasp as we go forward are:

You (usually) can’t reprice everything, every day.
When repricing by hand, you need to focus on maximizing efficiency.

This would be a much shorter article if I was going to tell you “Go reprice all your inventory every day.”

With those two things in mind, I’m going to outline a three-tier repricing system, that prioritizes based on demand, with each tier being repriced on a different schedule – some daily, some “as often as you can,'” and some rarely.

These three tiers are:

Tier #1: Low-demand inventory (reprice daily)

Tier #2: Medium-demand inventory (reprice when you can)

Tier #3: High demand inventory (reprice rarely)

With that understanding, let’s get into it…

Step One: Prep Your Inventory Page

Everything happens on your “Manage Pricing” page inside Amazon Seller Central (don’t get this confused with the “Manage Inventory” page).

First, we have to prepare the page so it shows the columns we need (and hides the ones we don’t).

Prep Step #1: Go to Manage Pricing page.

Link here.

Prep Step #2: Click the “Active” button

(You probably have this selected already).

This is so you only see active inventory.

See this image:

Prep Step #3: Go to your “Preferences” page.

See this image:

Prep Step #4: Enable the correct columns

At the top of the Preferences page, you’ll see a section that reads “Column Display.” Check the box next to these columns:

Sales Rank
Price
Lowest Price
Available
Product Name
Status

You can add to this list if you prefer, but these are the bare-minimum columns to enable.

Prep Step #5: Set the default filter option to “Fulfilled by Merchant.”

Even if you’re an FBA seller, do this.

Here’s why: On the Manage Pricing page, Amazon will tell you when you’re the lowest priced offer, and when you’re not. This is important for repricing, because it will tell us what inventory needs to be repriced, and what doesn’t.

In order to make that calculation, Amazon needs to know if you want to be alerted if you’re have the lowest price compared to all offers, or just by your fulfillment channel (MF or FBA).

By setting this to “Fulfilled by Merchant,” we can now effectively reprice our low-demand inventory. Why? Remember how I said we are doing this in three tiers, based on demand? For the lowest-demand items, I’m going to suggest comparing your inventory with a bad sales rank with all your competitors (not just other FBA offers). This “preps the page” for your low demand inventory, which will be the first step (more on that in a second).

(And if you’re not an FBA seller, you won’t ever need to change this setting).

Prep Step #6: Set sort order.

Scroll down on the Preferences page, and choose one of the two sort orders:

“Old to new” (sorts oldest inventory at the top)
“Price: High to low” (sorts highest-priced inventory at the top)

Which one you choose is left to your personal preference. You have to make a decision:

Do you want to give priority to your older inventory (and get it out the door to avoid long term storage fees, etc)?
Or do you want to focus on getting sales for your highest-value inventory (and getting the biggest payouts the quickest)?

Up to you.

Now we have effectively prepped the page for manual repricing. At this point, you probably really want to just dive in, start repricing, and start getting sales. But there’s one more step before the action begins…

Step Two: Establish your desired pricing outcome

I know you’re thinking “I just want my inventory to sell. Why do I need to get philosophical?!” But this is important.

You need to decide:

Do you want maximum profits, or maximum efficiency? (Are you more desperate for time, or money?)
Are you capable of repricing your entire inventory every day?

You have to get clear about these two questions.

If you are unable to reprice your entire inventory daily, set a schedule. Here’s what I suggest:

Tier #1: Low demand inventory (ranked worse than 1.5 million): Reprice daily.
Tier #2: Medium demand inventory (ranked between 100,000 and 1.5 million): Reprice as often as you can.
Tier #3: High demand (ranked better than 100,000): Reprice weekly-to-rarely.

Step Three: Reprice low demand inventory to sell

No matter what you decided above, Step Three is mandatory.

You’re going to go through all your low-demand inventory, and reprice it. Low-demand inventory always deserves top priority, because when something isn’t selling often, we need to be sure its always optimized so we get the next sale.

The definition of “low demand” is left to your personal preference. If I was forced to give a number (and you’re selling books), I would put it at anything with an Sales Rank of 1.5 million or worse.

There is no option to sort the page by Sales Rank (there should be), so you have to visually scan the Sales Rank column for any item that applies.

The pricing strategy for this tier is simple: Click “Match Low Price.”

This matches your price to the lowest overall price. Simple.

Some price drops could be hard to stomach. Up to you if you want to match every low price blindly, across the board, or you want to apply some discretion. But we are dealing with inventory that isn’t selling very often, so you want to price it to move.

Step Four: Reprice everything else

Two things we have to do to prep for repricing higher-demand inventory:

The important first step for Step Four is to go back to your Preferences Page and set the “Low Price Comparison” to “Same fulfillment channel.” We’ve already repriced our low-demand inventory, so if you’re an FBA seller, you only want to compare your price to FBA offers going forward.

The second step is to revisit the “profits vs efficiency” question I asked you to answer earlier. This is where that comes into play.

If you chose maximum profits, you’re going to click over to the Amazon product page for every item and look for opportunities to raise or lower the price.

If you chose maximum efficiency, you’re going to ignore any inventory Amazon has marked as “Lowest.” You will only be focusing on inventory where you are not the lowest price.

Sidebar: You are about to apply your personal pricing strategy

This article is about the mechanics of repricing by hand efficiently. The pricing strategy you apply (what prices you set) is an entirely different subject. I have quite a few articles on pricing strategy if you have not developed your own strategy yet. But you need to have one. Otherwise, you’re going to be flailing around, unsure what price to set.

Follow my personal repricing strategy if you’re totally clueless here.

Now we actually start manually editing prices

The steps to analyzing your competition to reprice are:

Step One: Click the Product Name

This opens the Amazon produce page in a separate tab

Step Two: Click again to view competing offers

You’ll get a slider/popout showing all your competitors, from lowest to highest price.

Step Three: Filter by Prime (if you’re an FBA seller)

Now you see who you’re competing with.

Note: If you want to cheat and skip a couple steps here, my tool NeuroPrice will let you avoid clicking over to Amazon. It shows a popup inside the Manage Pricing page with all competing offers, so you don’t need to click over. (It also does a lot more than that, but you’re free to just use this feature if you want). It lets you click any price and it will auto-load in the price field, which also saves tons of time.

Step Four: Set a price

Base on what you learned when reviewing your competitors, type the new price into the “Price” field on the Manage Pricing page.

Sidebar: How do you analyze your inventory to set a price?

Analyzing the available data to set a smart price is always a balance. You don’t want to spend too much time on each item, but you don’t want to reprice blindly either.

Here’s the data I suggest looking at:

Keepa price history charts: Available with the free version of Keepa. Embeds price history charts on the Amazon product page. Invaluable.
Keepa sales rank history charts: Only available with the paid version of Keepa, but strongly recomended.
Stock quantity: Also provided by Keepa.Allows you to see the number of copies in stock for your competitors.

I have a more in depth look at analyzing your inventory to set an intelligent price titled “How to price books for maximum profits.”

Step Five: Save your changes

Once you’ve repriced a page, click “Save All” at the top.

Done.

Recap: What does this formula accomplish?

We just outlined a multi-tiered process, based on inventory demand, to efficiently reprice your inventory.

We focused on giving priority to low-demand inventory, and decrease frequency based on demand, making it realistic to reprice even relatively large inventories by hand, with no paid tools (or one or two cheap ones, if you want to cheat).

You can now turn your inventory into cash by hand in the cheapest (and quickest) way possible, without being a slave to any paid repricing tool.

-Peter Valley

How to reprice your Amazon inventory for free (no tools)

Video: How to reprice Amazon inventory manually

What we’re going to cover

Warning: Repricing is not optional