Amazon Automate Pricing vs Ready for Commerce

Everything about Amazon's tool comes from Amazon's own published pages, and everything about ours comes from our code.

Amazon Automate Pricing is for sellers who want their prices moved and don't need to watch the moving. It's free, it's already in your account, and it applies solid rules.

Ready for Commerce is for sellers who need to see what the repricing is doing to the business. Setting the price is the easy half. The missing half is knowing which listings stopped repricing, what your margin really was after fees, and why one specific price changed.

That's the whole distinction, and everything below is evidence for it.

The basics

How it decides a price

What you can see afterwards

⚠ "Not documented" means exactly that. We checked our side against our own code and Amazon's side against its published pages, so where their documentation doesn't describe something we say so rather than claiming they lack it.

The third table is the one to read twice. The first two are close. That one isn't.

What Amazon's tool actually does

More than most comparisons admit. Amazon's own documentation lists six kinds of rule: Competitive Featured Offer, Competitive Lowest Price, Competitive External Price, Based on Sales Units, Business Competitive Featured Offer, and Business Price and Quantity Discounts.

A minimum price is required before a rule runs. A maximum is optional, and without one Amazon applies its own protection so you can't list far above recent prices.

⚠ If you've read that Amazon's tool has only three basic rules, that's out of date. We checked Amazon's documentation rather than other repricers' blog posts, because a comparison that understates the free option isn't a comparison.

What it does better than we do

It's free, permanently, and no version of our product beats free for a seller whose needs it meets.

There's nothing to connect. No authorisation, no initial sync, no waiting for a catalog, which is real time saved on day one.

It reads Amazon's data from the inside. Amazon isn't observing its marketplace, it's running it.

It reprices on sales velocity, and we don't. Moving a price by how fast something sells is a genuinely useful rule, and it isn't one we offer.

Where the difference actually shows

Three rows in that table carry most of the weight.

The floor can work out its own number

Amazon requires a minimum price and protects it properly. What it doesn't do is work out what your minimum should be: you type a number, and that number is the floor.

You can do exactly the same with us, and plenty of sellers do. The difference is that you don't have to.

Say you typed that floor nine months ago. It's only still profitable if the referral fee for that category, the fulfilment cost and the tier boundaries haven't moved since. Fees change and categories get reclassified, so an old floor is a guess that's still being enforced.

The alternative is to tell us what you want to protect instead of what to charge. Give it a target margin, or a target return on cost, and the engine estimates that listing's channel fee and works backwards: cost plus fees plus what you asked for. When the arithmetic underneath moves, the floor moves with it.

Both are one setting. Type the number when you know it and it's stable, and let it calculate when the fees are what keep moving.

Ten references instead of three, and the separations are the point

Amazon's competitive rules target the Featured Offer, the lowest price on Amazon, and the lowest external price. Ours target ten, and the useful part isn't the count.

Say two sellers are both cheaper than you: one ships from Amazon's warehouse, the other posts their own parcels. Those are two different numbers, and undercutting them is two different decisions. The one posting their own parcels can be slower and still be cheaper, which isn't the same threat as Amazon-fulfilled stock at the same price. In the trade these are FBA and FBM, and most tools give you one number for both.

Market average and cost-plus are references in their own right rather than special cases, so "never go below cost plus 22%" is something you point a rule at instead of a floor you keep updating by hand.

You can see what the repricing is doing

This is the row the whole page is really about.

Automate Pricing tells you which rule applied to a price. Beyond that, its documentation doesn't describe reporting.

Ours records the decision as it makes it, including which constraint won and which it overrode, and the result comes out in six reports: profitability, Buy Box ownership, repricing health, price changes, sales and units.

The health report is the one sellers don't know they need. It names which listings aren't repricing and why, from eight distinct reasons, because a listing that silently stopped is invisible until you go looking for it.

That's a different question from "what price". It's "is this working", and it's the one you ask at the end of the month.

Which one you should use

Amazon's is enough when you want prices kept competitive and the rule that fired answers your questions. It's free, it works, and there's no prize for paying. For a lot of sellers the decision ends there.

Look at us when any of these is true, and one is enough:

• –you want to know your margin after fees rather than after a number you typed;
• –you have listings that stopped repricing and no way to find out which;
• –a supplier holds you to a minimum advertised price and it has to win against every other rule;
• –you want to undercut Amazon-fulfilled and seller-fulfilled competitors differently;
• –you sell somewhere besides Amazon.

Our pricing is on the pricing page; the Repricer starts free and paid plans begin at $29 a month, flat.