In the competitive world of online retail, everyone knows that pricing can make or break your business. That’s why so many Walmart sellers rely on automated repricing tools that are designed to keep your prices competitive while still ensuring you make a profit on every sale.
If you’re considering using an automated repricer for the first time, it may be tempting to try out Walmart’s free repricing tool known as “the “Walmart Marketplace Repricer”. Since it’s included for every Walmart seller that is on the Professional Selling Plan, you may be wondering why so many sellers pay for third-party automated repricing tools instead of just using Walmart's included repricing tool.
There are several reasons why Walmart’s free repricing tool is so unpopular amongst sellers. After listening to feedback from Walmart sellers and conducting our own analysis of Walmart’s free repricing tool, we’ve found several reasons why sellers shouldn’t rely on Walmart’s Marketplace Repricer tool to manage their prices.
Walmart’s limited, basic repricing rules are a huge drawback for any serious sellers who cares about winning the Buy Box and still making a profit.
While third-party Walmart repricers offer a large array of repricing strategies (including repricing strategies that are powered by AI), Walmart's Marketplace Repricer tool only allows sellers to use three basic repricing rules: Stay below the chosen price by a specified amount, Match the chosen price, and Stay above the chosen price by a specified amount. These basic repricing rules aren’t intelligent enough for any serious Walmart seller to rely on because they only take the selected competitor into account and completely ignore all of your other competition.
Here’s an example of why you shouldn’t rely on Walmart's repricing rules:
Let’s say you’re competing with 17 other sellers on a listing where your item is currently priced at $17.50. You have a rule set up to beat your lowest competitor’s price by $0.10. One of your competitors suddenly drops their price to $10, resulting in your price being changed to $9.90. Meanwhile, all of your other competitors remain priced right around your original price of $17.50. Rather than waiting for the competitor who dropped their price to $10 to either sell out or raise their price back up to something reasonable, you will now likely sell a ton of units at an extremely low profit margin because Walmart prioritizes keeping prices low for consumers over keeping profits high for third-party sellers.
This leads us into the next issue with Walmart's Automate Pricing tool: their pricing rules ultimately lead to a “race to the bottom” every time.
Walmart's repricing rules are all centered around winning the Buy Box, and each rule is simply aimed at getting you in the Buy Box at the lowest possible price - this is great for consumers, but terrible for third-party Walmart sellers.
Since all of Walmart's repricing rules only take into account a single offer, there’s no opportunity to take the full range of your competition into account and price your item at a price that is still competitive on the listing without completely tanking your profits. This strategy may be effective if you’re simply trying to liquidate inventory, but if you want to sell products at a profitable price and improve your margins, Walmart's free repricing tool likely isn’t for you.
One of the major benefits of using a third-party repricing tool is the ability to automatically (and strategically) set your Min and Max prices.
When it comes to Min prices, it’s super important to set a minimum price threshold that still allows you to not only make a profit, but make a profit that you’re actually going to be satisfied with. The best third-party repricing tools allow you to automatically set Min prices based on a Target ROI, Profit Margin, or Fixed Profit.
While Min prices are typically viewed as the most important price threshold since they ensure you’re not selling your products at a loss, Max prices can be just as important. Some third-party repricing tools such as Informed Repricer have features that utilize AI to calculate the optimal Max price for every single one of your listings. These algorithms automatically determine a Max price that is high enough to increase your profits, but low enough to keep you in the Buy Box.”
Trying to manually figure out the optimal Min and Max prices for your listings is time-consuming, tedious, and nearly impossible when you have hundreds or thousands of listings. Walmart's repricer not offering automated Min and Max prices is yet another reason why it pales in comparison to third-party repricing tools.
Third-party Walmart sellers know that oftentimes their biggest competition is Walmart themselves. From directly competing on listings with third-party sellers to building pricing rules that seek to keep prices as low as possible for consumers, Walmart certainly doesn’t value your bottom line.
By using a third-party repricer, you can trust that Walmart doesn’t have access to sensitive data that they could use to undercut your business. You wouldn’t hand over your pricing strategies to any other competitors on your listings, and Walmart shouldn’t be an exception to that rule.
Your profits and sourcing costs are important pillars of your business that you want to keep to yourself. By using a third-party repricing tool instead of Walmart's repricing tool, you can ensure that your data remains safe and out of the hands of a major competitor.
When you’re deciding what repricing tool to use, you ultimately need to decide what’s important to you and your business. If high profit margins and protecting your pricing data is important to you, we don’t recommend using Walmart's Marketplace Repricer tool.
Instead, we recommend checking out some of the best third-party repricing tools on the market. Most third-party repricing tools offer free trials (Informed Repricer offers a 14-day free trial) so you can try out the tools for yourself and see which one offers the best repricing strategies for your business.
Informed Repricer helps professional sellers on Amazon and Walmart increase their sales and profits by keeping their prices competitive 24/7.
