3 Steps to use automated pricing in e-commerce

According to RetailTouchPoints, B2B eCommerce automation can increase team productivity by 45% and overall revenue by 49%.

How do you keep up with the ever-changing marketplace and make sure to determine the right price for your products? And at the same time, how do you increase your revenue and team productivity?

The answer is automated pricing.

Read along to learn how you can get started with pricing automation.

Table of contents: 

• What is pricing automation?
• Is price automation the same as dynamic pricing?
• Save time with automated pricing in your e-commerce business
• 3 steps to go from manual pricing to dynamic prices
• How to choose the right dynamic pricing software for my e-commerce business?
• How does automatic pricing work in PriceShape?

What is pricing automation?

Pricing Automation is when prices are automatically changed using a pricing software tool like, e.g., PriceShape. The prices are set according to predetermined rules or constraints, where you can set the variables for what the rules have to be and when you want to apply them. These rules are typically based on your pricing strategy.

Related reading: Price Strategies.

In many cases, pricing automation is used instead of manual pricing where an employee, e.g., an E-commerce or dedicated Pricing Manager, has to do the pricing work. The possibility to automatize this process is a significant advantage for most e-commerce stores because they save time and minimizes the number of human errors in their pricing.

With an efficient and organized management of your prices through a compelling pricing management tool like PriceShape, you avoid wasting a lot of time on manual pricing and don't risk leaving revenue on the table.

Is price automation the same as dynamic pricing?

Automated and dynamic pricing are closely linked, and in essence, it’s really the same thing. Simply put, dynamic pricing is the fully or partially automated process and adjustment of prices. For example, working with dynamic pricing in PriceShape is a process based on your own defined pricing rules that automatically change your prices and are typically based on the prices of your competitors' same products.

Save time with automated pricing in your e-commerce business

We often experience e-commerce stores that want to establish pricing automation but don't have the time to do it or find it far too difficult to prioritize. Therefore, many e-commerce stores often rely on the manual process.

You can be sure that at least 2 out of 3 of your competitors are probably already using some software to handle their pricing automatically, or at least considering it in the nearest future. Therefore, you should consider if and how you're already on your way to losing valuable ground to competitors.

If you find yourself in one of these situations mentioned beneath, you would greatly benefit from establishing automatic pricing for your e-commerce business:

• You have many repetitive tasks when it comes to pricing your products.
• You would like to have more time for other tasks, such as putting more effort into growing the business or improving the customer experience. 
• You find it difficult to measure your return on marketing spend.

Not only will you benefit from these situations, but if you have large product catalogs and a diverse customer base, pricing can be a massive challenge. Here, automation can help you manage and configure your product prices behind the scenes and accurately set the prices according to your defined pricing rules.

Most importantly, the biggest advantage of automated pricing is the time you save. There is no need to keep spending a lot of time and resources on pricing when you can automate and at the same time even optimize the process with a pricing tool.

Want to start to increase profit, improve efficiency, and lastly but not least, better control your pricing and pricing consistency?

3 steps to go from manual pricing to dynamic prices

To get started, you should make sure that you have the following in place to get the most out of your pricing automation. 

Jump into automation with these steps - and don’t worry, when you choose a pricing tool like PriceShape, we will make sure to assist you on your journey with pricing automation!

1. Make sure you have the right pricing strategy. Before you apply automation, a pricing strategy is needed. To find out which pricing strategy is the best for you, read this blog post to learn more about pricing strategies. By looking at your competitors and seeing what their price positions are, you get a good overview of how the competition is in the market. Here, PriceShape can help you with displaying a complete overview of all your competitors and their prices.
   
   
2. Use quality data from PriceShape. With a useful dashboard, you get an overview of how many competitors you have on your products and where it would be necessary to implement pricing automation. Here it is crucial that you can rely on your data, and that is why PriceShape gives you these insights, so you will be able to set the best pricing rules for your e-commerce business.
   
   
3. Choose the processes that will support your pricing strategy. Even though you automate your pricing and everything runs smoothly, you need to make sure that you check your pricing to make sure you have the right price matching and discounting on the right products, and this works to your advantage.

An e-commerce automation solution as PriceShape gives you relevant data for informed decision-making and addressing growth. More data is not necessarily worse if you have the right software to help you keep an overview of this data, so you only have to make the right business decisions.

How to choose the right dynamic pricing software for my e-commerce business?

Once you have decided to pursue the process of automating your pricing, your next consideration is whether you need a software platform that can do automation ONLY, or if you need a broader pricing platform that can also do things like, e.g., monitoring your entire competitive landscape, optimize your Google Shopping Feed, create pricing status reports or other features to ensure you place your marketing budget wisely.

When choosing a pricing optimization software, you should at least consider the following key features as the foundation for your selection:

Automatic and dynamic prices

Dynamic prices are flexible. Being flexible means that the price can either go down or up. Know which products are priced too high or may be priced too low, and adjust accordingly to the market. Implementing dynamic pricing keeps you competitive in the market.

Pricing strategies and rules

Improve pricing strategies and create price rules that are based on your customers’ buying behavior. With insights from an automated pricing tool, you get data on how your products perform and your customers’ demand for your products, incl. what your customers are willing to pay for certain products.

Pricing history

Keep track of your competitors’ prices and know their position in the market, but also your position as well. This already gives you a massive competitive edge.

Product recommendations

With product recommendations, you can see which e-commerce stores match your price on a specific product. This overview gives you a good idea of which products are most competitive, and from here, you can act based on the recommended prices of your products.

Domain summary

In the online market, you usually have hundreds or thousands of competitors competing for the same clients with the same products. It can be a hurdle or close to impossible to check all competitors all day long. Therefore, having a smart summary of all the domains of your competitors and quickly finding the most important data about them is key to being effective in your pricing. In addition, it saves you a lot of time.

An easy and quick way to integrate a pricing software with your e-commerce store

The set-up part can be the most challenging due to the various technical aspects of each e-commerce store. Here, it’s key to have an easy data export function of prices to integrate with your system. Hereunder, export your product feed and, nonetheless, update your data feed.

How does PriceShape’s automated pricing work?

With the PriceShape pricing tool, you can create different automated pricing rules or strategies for all your products, product types, and assortment.

In PriceShape, you have the best opportunity to set the most suitable strategies as you can create as many as you need for your e-commerce business and change them whenever you need to. This way, you will make sure to keep your prices optimized and can maximize your profit. 

We offer an easy plug & play solution for your e-commerce business.