Amazon Automate Pricing vs a third-party repricer: what each does
Automate Pricing is Amazon's repricer, included with the Professional selling plan. It moves your price against the Featured Offer, the lowest price, outside prices or your sales, within a minimum you type for each SKU. Third-party repricers can add finer competitor rules and floors from your costs. Start with Amazon's, and switch when typed minimums hold you back.
- Automate Pricing comes with Amazon's Professional selling plan at no extra charge. It needs an active offer on each product and a minimum price for each SKU.
- Its rules follow the Featured Offer, the lowest price on Amazon, prices outside Amazon, or your own sales. Amazon says updates usually go through in under 15 minutes.
- The minimum is a number you type. When your cost or Amazon's fees change, it stays where it was until you change it.
- Third-party repricers sell finer control over which sellers to respond to, and floors calculated from your costs, usually for a monthly subscription.
- Apex Gold sets floors from your cost and Amazon's fees and shows you each change first. Prices move when you press Run.
Once your first wholesale products are live, pricing turns into a daily job. You share each listing with other sellers, the Featured Offer moves between you, and sooner or later someone suggests a repricer. Amazon already gives you one. The question is whether it's enough, and what you'd get by paying for another.
This guide answers that for a wholesale seller on shared listings. It covers what Amazon's tool does, where it stops, what paid repricers add, how our own repricer works, and how to choose. If you're still learning how Amazon picks the offer in the first place, start with how the Buy Box works and come back.
Where we describe Automate Pricing, we go by Amazon's own US pages, linked in the Sources list. Amazon's Seller Central help pages on the tool go into more detail, but they need a sign-in, and nothing here rests on them. Where something has only been reported by sellers or by a repricing company, we say so.
What Automate Pricing does
Automate Pricing is Amazon's own repricer. You pick a rule, apply it to products, set a minimum price for each one, and Amazon changes your price for you when the rule says it should. It lives in Seller Central under Pricing, then Automate Pricing.
So the tool costs nothing beyond the plan itself. If you're on the Individual plan, you'd have to move to the Professional selling plan first, and our fees guide shows what each plan charges.
The rules you can choose
Amazon's guide to Automate Pricing rules lists six rule types to choose from when you create a custom rule. The middle column is Amazon's description; the right-hand column is our view for a wholesale seller.
| Rule | What Amazon says it does | When a wholesale seller might use it |
|---|---|---|
| Competitive Featured Offer | Prices you below, at, or slightly above the current Featured Offer price | The usual choice on a shared listing, where the Featured Offer is what you're competing for |
| Competitive Lowest Price | Prices you below, at, or just above the lowest price in the Amazon store | With care. The lowest offer on a listing may be a slower one that isn't competing for the Featured Offer at all |
| Competitive External Price | Compares your price with similar items outside the Amazon store | Products that big retailers also sell, where shoppers compare |
| Based on sales units | Adjusts your price to how quickly inventory moves, and lowers it when products sit unsold | Slow movers, after you've checked that price is the reason (more on this below) |
| Business Competitive Featured Offer | Competes for the Business Featured Offer by keeping your prices in line with other business sellers | Only if you sell to Amazon Business customers |
| Business Price and Quantity Discounts | Sets business prices and bulk discounts by order size | The same |
Amazon also offers predefined rules, which skip the setup. Either way, you apply a rule to products one SKU at a time or in bulk, with a file Amazon calls the Automate Pricing file, and then choose Start repricing.
Minimum and maximum prices
Every SKU on a rule needs a minimum price. Amazon's rules guide makes it required and suggests setting a maximum as well. Its reselling guide makes the same point for resellers: some sellers end up "in a race to the bottom," and setting a minimum price is how you keep a healthy margin.
The maximum is optional. If you leave it out, Amazon's tool page says the tool keeps your offers from going significantly higher than recent prices. That's a useful guard, because a price far above what a product has sold for recently can cost you the Featured Offer under Amazon's fair pricing rules (fair pricing and MAP explains them).
How fast it moves
Amazon's tool page describes Automate Pricing as adjusting your prices in real time and responding around the clock. Its FAQ is more specific: for rules you already have, price updates usually go through in under 15 minutes, though they can take longer. A new rule, or a change to a rule's settings, can take up to an hour to reach every product on it.
The same FAQ says Automate Pricing's changes don't count toward the daily price update allotment in Amazon's Price Update Policy. That policy is a Seller Central page we couldn't open without signing in, so we can't tell you the allotment or how it treats other tools. Check it in your account before you choose a tool that changes prices many times a day.
What you can see afterward
Amazon keeps a detailed 30-day history of what Automate Pricing changed, and suggests comparing it with your Business Reports to see what happened to your Featured Offer percentage and your sales. You can also decide which users on your account can use the tool, under User Permissions, which matters if a VA works in your Seller Central.
Where sellers find it limiting
Automate Pricing does what Amazon says it does. The limits a wholesale seller runs into come from what it doesn't know, and from how a shared listing behaves.
Your minimum is a number you typed
Amazon's rules guide asks for a minimum price you've worked out in advance, entered for each SKU one at a time or in bulk. Its public pages don't describe a way to calculate it from your costs. That's fine until your costs move, and in wholesale they move all the time.
One example, with made-up numbers. Say you set a minimum of $18.50 on a product that landed at $9.00 a unit, because at $18.50 you still kept $2.00 after Amazon's fees and your other costs. Your next purchase order lands at $9.70: the supplier raised its case price and freight went up. Automate Pricing doesn't know. Every sale at $18.50 now keeps $1.30, not $2.00. If competitors hold the price at your minimum for a month, you sell that month at about a third less profit than you planned, and nothing warns you.
The same happens when Amazon changes its fees. Its referral fee is a share of the price (referral fees by category), and the FBA fulfillment fee depends on the product's price, weight and dimensions (size tiers and fulfillment fees). A minimum you typed last year doesn't follow either one.
It follows one reference price, with a few filters
Each rule watches one thing: the Featured Offer, the lowest price in the store, the lowest price outside it, or your own sales. On a shared listing that matters, because the cheapest offer isn't always the one taking your sales. Amazon's FAQ on the tool says a lower price can help you become the Featured Offer, but you also need to meet requirements for inventory availability, fulfillment and customer service. Delivery speed counts too (how Amazon chooses the offer), so a slower offer a dollar below you may not be competing with you at all.
You do get some say in which offers count. Amazon's reselling guide says you can set up a competitive rule to compete based on feedback rating, fulfillment channel or other factors. What its public pages don't describe is a way to leave out one particular seller, such as the one who always undercuts, or to respond differently to each seller. That finer control is what third-party repricers sell (more below).
The Seller Central help pages may describe more options than the public guides. Check them in your own account before you decide the tool can't do something.
Older reports of prices stuck at the minimum
Amazon has since announced on the same forums that rules comparing your price with prices outside Amazon can raise it when the outside price rises, as long as no offer on Amazon meets your rule's criteria. Its tool page also says rules can set your price below, above, or at the reference price. We haven't tested how current rules behave when the other sellers leave a listing. If you use Automate Pricing, look through the 30-day history for products sitting at their minimum with nobody else on the listing.
Slow sales aren't always a price problem
The sales-based rule lowers your price when products sit unsold. Sometimes that's the right answer. From Stef's Restocking lesson (10:52 to 11:15), he reads slow stock the same way: when some products are carrying more than 60 days of inventory, he says that isn't a bad sign. It probably means the price isn't right to get the sales within the Buy Box, so he adjusts the price in his Amazon account.
The difference is that it's his call, made with the numbers in front of him. A rule can't tell whether a product is slow because of its price, because you ran out of stock last week, because your delivery date is slower than the others, or because Pricing Health has flagged the offer. Cutting the price fixes only the first. Before you put slow movers on a sales-based rule, run through the checklist for a falling Featured Offer percentage.
It knows your price, not your profit
Automate Pricing knows your minimum and maximum. Amazon's public pages don't describe it knowing what the product cost you or what you made on the sale. The rules guide's own answer to how to monitor the tool is to watch your Featured Offer percentage, your sales volume and your profit margins. The first two are in Seller Central. The third is in your own records, and it's the one that tells you whether the tool is helping.
Apex University comes with a free Apex account: nine lessons, no card.
What third-party repricers add
Third-party repricers are separate subscriptions that connect to your Amazon account and change your prices for you. Amazon points to its Selling Partner Appstore for them. Each one works differently, so here is what the companies say they add, and what to check before you pay.
Finer control over which offers you respond to. BQool's page on its rule-based repricer says you can compete differently against each seller, exclude certain sellers to avoid price wars, filter competitors by their positive feedback rating, set different responses for each Buy Box situation (including when you already hold it), and pause or adjust strategies for peak hours and holidays.
Other ways of deciding the price. Some offer modes beyond fixed rules. BQool's overview, for example, describes AI strategies that adjust prices based on market conditions, alongside rule-based and conditional ones.
Floors from your costs, and speed. These two are the companies' strongest claims against Amazon's tool, so read them as claims.
More channels. Some repricers price the same products on other marketplaces as well as Amazon. If you sell beyond Amazon, that can decide it on its own.
A monthly bill. Most third-party repricers charge a subscription, usually priced by the number of listings or by features. Prices change often, so read them on each company's own pricing page. Our comparisons with BQool, Informed Repricer, Seller Snap, Aura and Repricer.com link each one.
What no repricer can do, Amazon's or anyone else's:
- Promise you the Featured Offer. Amazon's FAQ says automating your price doesn't guarantee it. Price is one factor; stock, delivery and seller performance count too.
- Make a product profitable. If every seller on a listing runs a tool that matches the lowest price, the tools only get everyone to their floors faster. Our guide to products to avoid shows how to spot a price war before you buy into one.
- Share a SKU with another repricer. Two tools pricing the same offer can override each other, and the price ends up wherever the last one left it. Pick one tool per SKU, and stop the other's repricing on it first.
How Apex Gold moves prices
Apex Gold is our repricer. It's in beta, and it's rule-based, not AI. It works from the same numbers you use to buy: the cost of each product in your Apex database, and Amazon's fees.
Prices change when you run your strategies from Apex. Repricing automatically the moment a competitor changes price is built but not switched on yet.That's the main way it differs from the tools above: you build the strategy, look at what it would change, and press Run. Nothing moves before that.
To use it you need your Amazon account connected to Apex, product costs in your Apex database (so the floor is real), and a target for each listing or group: a minimum ROI, margin or dollar profit.
- Set floors from your own numbers
Set floors from your cost and Amazon's fees, or from a target ROI, margin or dollar profit, in bulk across your listings. You can set a ceiling too, so prices stay between the two.
- Build a strategy and assign it
Build a strategy for how to respond to competing offers, and assign it to the listings it should run on.
- Preview the changes
Before any price moves, Gold shows what the strategy would change on each listing, so you can catch a floor that looks wrong.
- Turn listings on and press Run
Turn on the listings you want repriced and run your strategies. Every price decision is logged in Price Activity with the reason for it.
Gold also shows MAP status by brand. Like every repricer, it can't promise you the Buy Box or a profit. The floor only stops it pricing below your own numbers.
The repricer is part of the Pro plan. How Gold works has the details, and pricing shows what each plan includes.
Which fits a wholesale seller
There's no single right answer, but the decision usually comes down to how many shared listings you have, how often your costs change, and how fast you need to respond.
| Your situation | What we'd use |
|---|---|
| A handful of products, a few sellers on each | Price by hand once a day, with a minimum written down for every product |
| Many products on shared listings, costs that rarely change | Automate Pricing on the Competitive Featured Offer rule, with minimums from your own numbers |
| Costs that change with every purchase order, or margins thin enough that a stale minimum hurts | A repricer that works out floors from your costs: a third-party tool, or Gold |
| You need a response within seconds to every competitor change | A third-party repricer that says it reprices in real time. Gold doesn't do that |
| You want to see each change before it happens, with a reason logged for every move | Gold |
| You sell the same products on other marketplaces | A multichannel repricer |
| You're on the Individual selling plan | Price by hand, or move to Professional first; Automate Pricing needs it |
If you're new, start free. Price by hand or with Automate Pricing for your first few months. You'll learn which of your listings actually change price during the day, and which ones a repricer would never touch. Then pay for a repricer if the listings that move are many, and the minimums you keep retyping are costing you.
Whichever you choose, judge it by profit per product, not only by how often you hold the Buy Box. From Stef's walkthrough lesson (20:43 to 21:06), on why Apex shows gross profit per ASIN:
"As you're selling items and prices are changing, you have a repricer, you're liquidating, whatever the fact may be, we wanna show you exactly what is your KPI."
His point is the trajectory: after the prices have moved, is your profit per product holding steady or climbing? A repricer that wins you more of the Buy Box at a lower profit per unit can leave you with less money for more work. Our guide to wholesale profit margins covers what a good ROI and margin look like.
Whichever you choose, set the minimum from your own numbers
Amazon asks for a minimum price on every SKU, and every other repricer needs a floor of some kind. Work it out the same way for all of them.
- Your landed cost per unit. The supplier price plus freight, prep, labels and any inbound placement fee. Landed cost walks through each part, and your purchase orders are where the real figure lives.
- Amazon's fees at that price. The referral fee and the FBA fulfillment fee. Our FBA calculator shows both for an ASIN (3 free lookups, then sign in with a plan), or use Amazon's FBA Revenue Calculator in Seller Central.
- The least you'll accept. A dollar profit or a return on what you paid that makes the sale worth the cash it ties up.
- The brand's MAP, if you agreed to one. Your minimum is the higher of your cost floor and the brand's minimum advertised price.
The calculator below does the arithmetic. Type a selling price, pick the fee category, enter the FBA fulfillment fee, your prep and other costs per unit, and what you pay the supplier. Then lower the selling price until profit per unit reaches the least you'll accept. That price is your minimum. In a category whose referral rate changes at a price threshold, check a few cents either side of it: setting your floor shows why the answer isn't always a straight line.
Profit and most-you-can-pay calculator
Per unit, from Amazon's FBA fulfillment fees page or Amazon's Revenue Calculator. Leave it empty if you ship orders yourself.
Per unit.
Per unit: storage, returns, ads, anything else you count.
Per unit.
Type what you pay the supplier.
Runs in your browser from Amazon's published US fee tables. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.
For the maximum, look at what the product has actually sold for over the last few months, not today's price. Keepa's price history shows it, and reading Keepa charts explains where to look. A maximum near that range keeps you clear of a price spike that won't last.
Then write down when you'll revisit it. A minimum is only as good as the costs behind it.
- A new purchase order lands at a different cost per unit.
- Freight, prep or labeling costs change.
- Amazon changes its referral or FBA fees for the product.
- The brand changes its minimum advertised price.
- You decide you need a higher return on the product.
Questions about Automate Pricing and repricers
Is Amazon Automate Pricing good enough for a wholesale seller?
For many, yes, especially at the start. It's included in the Professional plan, it responds to the Featured Offer on shared listings, and Amazon says it usually updates prices in under 15 minutes. It starts to fall short when your costs change often, because each minimum is a number you have to update by hand, and when you want finer control over which sellers to respond to than its filters give you.
Does Amazon charge extra for Automate Pricing?
No. Amazon includes Automate Pricing in the Professional selling plan, so the cost is the plan's monthly fee, which you pay anyway as a Professional seller. Our fees guide shows the plan fee.
Can I use Automate Pricing on the Individual selling plan?
No. Amazon's page on the tool says you need a Professional selling account and an active offer on each product you apply a rule to.
Can I run Automate Pricing and another repricer on the same SKU?
Don't. Two tools pricing the same offer can override each other, and your price ends up wherever the last one left it. Choose one tool per SKU, and stop repricing on the old one before the new one starts.
Does Apex Gold change my prices while I'm away?
No. Prices change when you run your strategies from Apex. Repricing automatically the moment a competitor changes price is built but not switched on yet. Gold shows you what would change first, and logs every price decision with its reason.
Paste an ASIN for its Buy Box price, Amazon fees and your profit at your cost.
You don't need to pay for anything at this stage.
Sources
- Automate Pricing, Amazon
- Save time and boost sales with Amazon Automate Pricing rules, Amazon
- Reselling in Amazon Stores: Guidelines and Tips for Success, Amazon
- New Automate Pricing feature will help protect your margins (News_Amazon), Amazon Seller Forums
- Selling Partner Appstore, Amazon
Reported by others
- Automate Pricing Tool Sticking at Minimum Price (sellers' thread, US Seller Forums), sellers on the US Seller Forums
- Amazon's Repricer vs a Third-Party Repricer: The Real Difference, Repricer.com
- Highly Customizable Amazon Repricing Rules, BQool
- BQool Repricing Central overview, BQool
We build software for Amazon sellers who buy from wholesale suppliers, and we write these guides from what we see in that work.
What is an IP complaint or a Section 3 deactivation, and how do I avoid one?