Automated repricing that respects your margin floor

Repricing has a bad reputation for a good reason. Two automated repricers pointed at each other will undercut in a loop until both are selling below cost, and neither of them notices, because neither was told what “too cheap” means for your business.

The fix is not cleverer competition. It is a floor that the automation is structurally incapable of crossing.

A rule is a band, not a target

Every repricing rule in Qwikr carries a floor. The rule may move your price anywhere above it and nowhere below it, so the worst case of a bad rule, a bad competitor or a bad day is that your price sits at the lowest figure you were ever willing to accept.

That is a deliberately boring failure mode. An automation you have to watch is not saving you anything.

Tiers, because one percentage is the wrong shape

A flat “always 2% below the lowest” is a rule that makes sense at one price and nowhere else. Two percent of a £4 item is 8p, which nobody notices; two percent of a £400 item is £8, which is a chunk of your margin given away for a gap the buyer would not have blinked at.

So rules are tiered: a threshold and a value, so the behaviour changes with the price band. Cheap lines can chase aggressively because the absolute amounts are small. Expensive lines move in the increments that actually matter.

Rounding, so prices look chosen

An automated price is recognisable. £18.63 tells a customer that a machine picked it, and machine-picked prices read as arbitrary rather than considered.

Rules round to a convention you set, so the output looks like a price a human decided on. It is a small thing that costs nothing and stops the whole listing looking automated.

Scope, so a rule cannot escape

A rule declares what it applies to rather than running across everything by default. All products, or a subset — so a rule written for clearance lines cannot quietly start repricing your core range because somebody forgot it was on.

Rules can also work from your regular price rather than your current one, which matters during a promotion: without it, a rule compounds against a price that was already discounted, and each pass discounts the discount.

What it will not do

• It will not price below your floor. If the only way to win the buy box is to lose money, you do not win the buy box.
• It will not invent a price for a product with no competitors. There is nothing to reprice against, and guessing is worse than leaving it.
• It will not reprice a channel that holds your stock record. The same principle as stock: one system owns a number, and the others follow.

The honest limitation

A repricer competes on price, which is the only lever it has. If your competition is a larger seller with better buying, repricing will not fix that — it will just find the point where you stop being profitable more efficiently than you would by hand. The floor is where you tell it that point is, so put real thought into it.