Transcript
Jim: There you go. Thanks for the shoutout. That’s our tagline, all the business-building warriors, which I count you guys in the ranks. You’re out there building businesses and serving people well, well done. We have Eric and Samuel here. Samuel, why don’t we start with you. This is a show today about repricers. Just take us through what is a repricer and who is BQool. From a high level, talk us through it.
Samuel: Sure, absolutely. I’m the brand evangelist for the company and we’ve got Eric, our global marketing senior corporate manager here.
Eric: Hi, guys.
Samuel: We work with a lot of different experts, a lot of different sellers, industry leaders who are repricing all the time. They use BQool. Just to give you some information about BQool, our company was founded in 2011. We’re part of a marketplace development council. We’ve been in the business for more than ten years helping people reprice. We have hundreds of thousands of customers historically in the past. We also have been helping people repricing for billions of dollars already on Amazon. We’re well approved on trust pilot, on web retailer, and also on all these other different platforms. You can go out and look up our reputation. We’ve been in the business for a long time.
Jim: Beautiful, and for those who maybe don’t even know, we’ve used a word that’s new to them today. Repricer, what is that? Just hit the basic level. If I’m selling on Amazon and I don’t know what a repricer is, talk me through it.
Samuel: Okay, well, a repricer is actually real simple. A repricer basically changes the price on the seller’s behalf. You have a min price and you set a max price and these act as the safeguards. When you set the prices and you set a rule, then the rule will bring you between your mins and your max. It really depends on what you want to do, whether you want to get more sales or you want to have a higher per unit profit. It’s really about finding that right balance to maximize the total amount of profits that you get. Then the main purpose of a repricer is to help you win the buy box. To understand this, you want to go, what is the buy box? The buy box is when you’re on any of the Amazon listings, Amazon most of the time rewards the buy box to certain sellers. If you have the buy box, you get about 80% to 85% of your sales.
There’s all these different variables that go into winning the buy box. You have to be a professional seller, different fulfillment types, your selling price. It’s really complicated because of all of these different variables and nobody really knows how to track the Amazon algorithm for getting the buy box. We’ve done a lot of research and we’ve identified some of the variables that have a very high degree of impact. There’s the fulfillment method, if you’re doing FBA against FBM, then Amazon is going to reward the people who are using their services who’re using their warehouses. Then also the selling price, and then also where you’re shipping from, these are some of the main factors. We’ve taken all of these factors and we’ve put them into our AI repricer to help you get the buy box easier, but to get it faster, easier than before.
Jim: I love it. We’ve got a lot to unpack in what you just said. I’m following you very well, but I have to keep an ear for the sellers in our community and maybe some of the new folks looking at this business and thinking, okay, what is this. Let me just throw a couple of basics, and correct me if I’m wrong on any of this, guys. A repricer isn’t something you need day one if you’re going to sell on Amazon. It’s something you need, I think typically we tell our folks, after you’re doing a few $1,000 a month. You’re coming up on 100 ASINs or so, are you finding yourself spending a lot of time repricing your products you kind of want to automate that? Like you said, Samuel, it’s a matter of maximizing your return, basically. You’re happy selling at a lower price with high volume, you can set your repricer to do that, or you want to wait, maximize your return and you ok, maybe selling it less often. You’re trying to get that buy box, which I love the statistic you shared about 80% to 85% of all sales go through the buy box, which leaves a lot of sales that happen outside the buy box, which we see all the time on a lot of our products.
We have well over 1,000 products, just to use a specific example. My mom’s in the process right now of using you guys’ education to get some of our settings up to where they need to be so that we can maximize and move our products. Here, let me just give one other little basic piece. We all do this all day, every day, but for the listeners’ sake. If you’re selling a product and there’s 5, or 10, or 30 other people selling it, you’ve got to monitor your price to stay competitive. You don’t have to be the lowest price. I think we need to emphasize that as well. You do want to be in the competitive range where you’re getting a piece of the buy box as Amazon rotates. Having a repricer, and this is where we step into your arena of expertise, gives you some serious advantages. I think we’ve identified who needs it and what it’s for. I want to step into some of what makes what you guys do different and better because you do have some competitors out there. Where do you stand in the marketplace? What gives you guys an advantage? What are some of the things that you guys are doing?
Samuel: I’ll start out and then I’ll let Eric jump in there. You’re absolutely right. When people had maybe over 100 listings, it really depends on what you’re selling, but usually over $5,000 of monthly revenue. I know for your Replens program, you start building up small and then you get around $10,000 and then you move up from there as you get more and more sales. For a repricer, when you’re up to about $10,000 monthly, then it’s a good time to use the AI repricer. Let me explain to you why. Because for the repricer, and we’ve seen from our statistics that it would help you maybe increase the buy box from maybe 12% to 20%. Let’s do an example. Let’s say you had $10,000 of monthly sales and you want to increase your profits. You want to determine whether or not you should invest into a repricer or not. It’s a business decision. It’s about investing into software that’s going to get you more ROI. When you first start out, you might not have a repricer, but naturally, when you don’t have the time to do all the repricing and when your business grows and as you scale up to the next level, you definitely need a repricer.
Our example, let’s say you have $10,000 of sales and you increase the buy box after using a repricer by maybe around 10%, but then your sales might increase maybe by 8% because you might get some lower prices, but when you’re repricing a lot more you get the buy box. Then you make another $800 and then that $800 is going to easily cover your investment for a repricer. Now, back to what you said, how are we different from our competitors? How are we different, Eric? What do you think?
Eric: Yeah, I think we need to talk about the competitors a bit. We do realize that a lot of Amazon sellers do use repricers to compete and to try to win the buy box since 80% to 85% of the sales having the buy box, and even though there is Amazon buy box rotation happening, the longer you’re in the buy box, the more sales you are bound to make. We do suggest people to use a repricer in that regard. However, not all repricers are built equal. For example, algorithmic, which we call rule-based repricers, they may perform inferior in some aspects compared to an AI repricer, like the one we provide right now. When new competitors are coming into your listings and trying to sell against what you’re selling as well as a new competitor, sometimes a rule-based repricer, algorithmic repricers, just don’t react as well compared to AI repricer. I think that’s why AI is so great in repricing optimally for a lot of the Amazon sellers. If they have a lot of very competitive listings, AI excels in that aspect. Also, for example, some sellers, they may struggle in finding the optimal rule in repricing the listings because they need to come up with strategies about how to drop down FBA compared to FBM and how to increase the price up, for example, maybe FBA sellers. AI just owns that automatically.
It’s really tailor made for all the Amazon sellers who require that extra horsepower in getting the buy box more efficiently because AI can do that itself and the seller doesn’t need to set up very complicated rules for different competitors. The AI could do that automatically because it has machine learning. It can learn the market. It would know the market trends, the sales trends, and also it would know the historical prices so that it would try repricing to the buy box at the price that’s the most profitable.
Samuel: Then just to add on to that. How are we different from competitors? Because you’re right. There’s different competitors in this industry. Many of their customers have moved on to BQool. The reason, as Eric mentioned, is because we have AI. We are the leaders in AI repricer. We’re affordable. We’re an affordable AI repricer. There’s other competitors out there that have hundreds and hundreds of dollars just to get into using the AI repricer because it takes a lot of investment, a lot of resources just to create the AI. We offer it at a price point that is affordable to most sellers. We’re able to do that because we have a large customer base.
Something that also differentiates us from other people is we actually have a team of AI engineers. We have an in-house team of engineers that can continue to develop. If our audience, if you have a good idea, you could tell us and we could make it happen, we can improve the rules, but we’ve done a lot of research already. We also offer five AI rules that are dependent on your sales and also your profit. Our software definitely is affordable AI because we want to help all the different sellers. We’ve been in the business for more than ten years and we also have very innovative technology.
Jim: You start talking about the five rules, some of these AI rules that you guys have said. Can you give me an example of one of those? We don’t have to get into the nerdy details, but what kind of things are you monitoring? What are you looking for that gives me an advantage that I couldn’t do myself? While I’m sleeping, the repricer is doing what specifically? What’s it looking for? What’s it responding to? Talk me through a real-world scenario, if you will.
Samuel: Sure, okay, let’s use an example. Let’s say I’m selling some chocolates that I got through for special deal, but there’s a lot of people who are selling the same chocolates. I got these from Walmart or from somewhere else. It’s repricing down. There’s a lot of competitors. Maybe we’re thinking about maybe 20 competitors in the marketplace. It starts repricing down. It goes down by a penny. It keeps going down. Then finally, I get the buy box. Then now I set it to go up to raise the price. If you’re using a rule base, you need to set the amount that you raise. You can set by percentage or by a certain amount. It slowly raises it. Then once I lose the buy box, then it will lower the price again. That would be rule-based. That’s how it would act, but with AI, I can immediately get down to the price where I’ll get the buy box so I’ll get the buy box a lot faster than the rule-based. Once I get the buy box, I’ll start to incrementally reprice up, but I won’t reprice up just by a certain percentage or by a certain number that I’ve set. I will go up by the amount that I can still hold the buy box. That really depends on which AI rule you pick. I’m just going to share my screen for the audience. For most of the audience who are on the podcast, I’m going to be very descriptive. I’m going to go through this so that you can clearly understand.
Jim: For those who are listening only, I just want to say, if you go to silentjim.com, we’ll put a picture of this graphic that Samuel is showing, if you’re listening. If you’re on YouTube, you see it now, but if you don’t see it, there’s a link in the show notes to show the graphics that Samuel has on the screen here.
Samuel: Thanks, Jim. We have five different AI rules. They come from the most aggressive on the left-hand side to the least aggressive. What that means when I say aggressive is how much do they lower the price by when they go for the buy box. Once they get the buy box, how often does it raise it back up. With the five AI rules, we call them AI sales maximizer because its purpose is to maximize your sales. Then we have the AI sales booster. Then in the middle, we have the AI equalizer, which puts emphasis on both your sales and also your profits. Then we have the AI profit booster, which focuses more on profit. Then we have the AI profit maximizer that maximizes on the profit per unit that you’ll get.
Then the question becomes how do you pick which of these rules. It really depends what your goal is, if your goal is to have higher sales or whether it’s to have higher per unit profits. If you want to get – I’ll give you an example. It also depends on how much stock that you have. Do you have lots of stock or do you have just a little stock for that product? Are you starting to incur long-term storage fees? Let’s go back to my example about the chocolates. Let’s say I have the chocolates and they’re going to expire soon. I need to liquidate the product otherwise Amazon is going to sell it out for me, they’re going to liquidate it for me after about 50 days.
Eric: You may even go perishable. It may go bad.
Samuel: Yeah, or maybe you’re doing a tropical and the expire date is coming up and you still have a lot of stock. In that scenario, we might pick a more aggressive AI rule, like the AI sales maximizer that’s going to aggressively try to sell this product. It’s going to move more towards your min price. Once it gets the buy box, then it will continue to hold around there. It won’t go back up too high so you continue to hold that. You’re getting the buy box a lot more and you’re maximizing your sales. Now, let’s go to the other example. Let’s say Halloween is coming around the corner. There’s cyber – there’s black…
Eric: Yeah, black Friday, cyber Monday, right?
Samuel: Cyber Monday, and then also Christmas is coming. As we know, there’s a shortage. You talked about this in some of your episodes as well. There’s a shortage. The container expenses are a lot more now. I have a bunch of toys that I sourced. I know that these toys are going to be high in demand. I checked the Keepa charts. I looked at CamelCamelCamel. I know that these toys are hot products and they’re going to sell. I’m going to pick an AI rule that’s going to maximize the per unit profit rather than going in for the sales right away. I would wait. It would slowly sell off my stock, but it’s going to price it at a higher price. The AI is going to do that for me. It’s going to keep pricing up as well.
Another example, let’s say I’m selling just groceries. Maybe I’m selling health products. Maybe the best seller rank is within 50,000. These products are also decent. They also sell decently. Then there’s not a healthy amount of competitors so it’s not more than 20. Then for this product, I might put it on an AI equalizer because I know it’s going to sell, but I know the prices are not going to be increasing later on. I want to sell the product so I can flip my products. I could get an inventory turnover. Along the replens that you mention in your courses, a lot of them will go on the AI equalizer. For all our users, if you’re not sure, you can start out with the AI equalizer and then you can move it to more aggressive or less aggressive. What about the sell-through rate, Eric? What do you think the other way to…
Eric: Yeah, I do think the sell-through rate also works on the equalizer because the equalizer setting is more of a middle setting. It’s a balance one. Some people may not know how well the items want to be sold for or how fast they want to sell those items because sales velocity does get taken into account for the buy box acquisitions for all of the sellers. There are times that some customers, some of our users just wanted to sell the items quickly. Maybe not liquidate quickly, but they want to have a better sell-through rate to improve perhaps their buy box win percentage or even to have a larger pool of available FBA inventory because we all know that Amazon is now restricting sellers based on how well the products get sold on Amazon. The worst performing ones just don’t get that large of FBA inventory size. I think there are times that if a seller does want to have a higher sell-through rate, they can use the AI to do that because AI does take that into account as well. If you set it properly with the equalizer, it would try to improve the sell-through rate of that item and it would analyze the past 90 days how well this product sold and then it would set up the proper parameters to actually get sold at a healthy sales velocity.
Samuel: Then what Eric mentioned is with the FBA sell-through rate, you could actually check that on your Amazon seller central if you’re using FBA. You go to your inventory, go to inventory planning, and look at the account health and it’s going to show you the sell-through rate. That’s based on 90 days and also the inventory that you have. Then if you want to do a scientific approach of picking the AI rule, then you can look at that and determine which AI rule you’re going to use. Then that’s going to give you some guidance as well of which AI rule to use based on the sell-through rate. That’s how you can pick the AI rule. Then I think we do need to mention also about what’s the difference. What are the main differences between the AI rule that we offer compared to rule-based rules, algorithmic? What are the main differences?
Eric: Yeah, we mentioned before, the algorithmic rules are a lot more restrictive in terms of, I think, the repricing settings because it has a set of parameters that it needs to follow suit. AI is a lot more robust in that regard. It would have different parameters triggered by different competing scenarios. I do think in that aspect, AI repricers can perform much better, especially when you get a lot of new competing sellers coming in to sell the same listings, as you may do in Q4. This is why we do have a lot of our repricing users switch over to AI and they do see a significant boost in result.
Jim: One of the things I’m thinking, guys, as I listen to you talk through this, for those who don’t have the visual, that would’ve helped, but basically, just think of five different levels, five different settings. You have everything from aggressive, like I’m thinking, and this may be an oversimplification, but an aggressive strategy that says, “Hey, get rid of this stuff. I’m done with it. The expiration date is coming. There’s too many sellers now. Get rid of this aggressively.” All the way up to, and I was thinking examples from my own inventory, we have some items where I’m okay waiting a while. It’s an FBM item maybe even. It’s sitting on my shelf in my storage warehouse. I know eventually it’s going to sell for a nice margin. I want the repricer to bump around a little bit, but I don’t want it to just go into the dirt and go down to my lowest possible price. I want it to be aggressive and stay high. I’m not going to get a storage fee. That’s the reason I mentioned Merchant Fulfilled. There’s no storage fees involved there. It’s sitting on my shelf. I don’t have to worry about Amazon saying, “Oh, you’ve had that a while now. We’re going to start hitting you with fees.” It’s FBM. I’ll probably be more aggressive there in the other direction of keeping the price higher. Once I do win the buy box, I want to inch it up pretty aggressively. That’s the difference in the settings.
One of the things you just mentioned, Samuel, that was of interest to me, we’ve been looking for a while now for a report in Amazon or something that tells us the velocity of our inventory when it’s in stock. Does that make sense? Because so many items are hard to find. I may have it for a few weeks and then I’m sold out for a few weeks. Then I have it for a few weeks and then it’s sold out for a few weeks. Do you happen to know, and this is getting off topic a little bit, but do you happen to know, is there a way to know how fast does an item sell only when it’s in stock? Have you ever heard that challenge before? Does that question make sense to you or do I need to rephrase it?
Samuel: Yeah, I think that’s a good question. We have some sellers who have contacted us about that. Again, what we’ve done, we found that using the FBA sell-through rate, if the product is already FBA, that’s a good way to see how fast your products are selling. That’s a way that you could pick. Another way definitely you could also check the quantity that you have when you have a lot of inventory or do you have less of it.
Jim: I’m talking about we go from having 20 units to 0 for a few weeks. Then we have 30 and then we have 0 for a couple months. Then you look at a six-month window of your data and it’s hard to read because you’re factoring in all the times when you hit zero. I think a lot of sellers’ inventory looks that way. That might be a challenge for you guys to tackle, too, for your engineers is, how fast does this item sell when it’s in stock? It’s not always in stock. That’s the reality for a lot of sellers now is it’s not always in stock. I don’t think Amazon provides that data to us. You can ignore the times when you’re out of stock and see what’s the true velocity of this inventory when it is available. That helps you make more intelligent decisions as well. I was just curious if you guys had ever tackled that problem as we’re thinking all the factors through.
Eric: Like Samuel said as well, it is definitely a very good question. As I mentioned before in the previous questions, sales velocity does get taken into account in AI repricer. From the meetings that we had before we launched the AI, we actually had to discuss how the AI repricer should be built. It does take into account the items that are in stock to calculate the sales velocity. When it is out of stock, that set of data isn’t really being considered because we do know – because there are times that sellers may not replenish their inventories for a certain period of time, the replen draw the listing that they sell could just happen to be out of stock for two months. Then when that item gets restocked and they start selling again, the calculation may be different because the sales velocity will be different in each different period of sales. That does get taken into account. If it’s out of stock, usually the repricer will not reprice that item.
Samuel: We have a setting in our software for products that go out of stock. You could actually set it. You could set the setting where if the product goes out of stock, then it would pause the repricing. Once you replenish it, then you can actually pick how do you want to reprice. You want to reprice from your maximum price. You go from your minimum price. We have a setting that is for customers that have this issue.
Eric: I just want to add that, yes, I think the issue with the – for example, the out of stock and in stock one for the sales velocities, the AI does calculate, I think, the sales velocity when the item is in stock. I don’t think it does take into consideration – take the out of stock into consideration, otherwise that would skew the data. That wouldn’t really be an issue for AI repricer because –
Jim: That’s an important detail. I think the reality for a lot of sellers, again, to restate and reframe the topic, which you guys are addressing beautifully, by the way, is I have 20 of an item and they sell out. They sell out fast. I was excited about it. Then I go three or four months and I can’t find it. Then I find it again. I don’t want the repricer thinking it took me – I don’t want it calculating in all that dead time where I didn’t have the item into the cost. That setting you talked of, Samuel, is that a one-time switch I turn on and say, “Hey, when this is out of stock, ignore the velocity, don’t adjust the repricer.” Is that a one-time setting or do I have to turn it off and on as I get –
Samuel: To answer your question, it’s a setting in the general setting which you can set for your listing so you can also know how it behaves once you’ve replenished a stock. The other one Eric was mentioning that the AI does take into consideration if you’re out of stock, if your competitors are out of stock. It would take those into consideration when it reprices for you. We have considered that, but for the very detailed explanation, we have a large team of engineers, they would do a much more detailed explanation in case for the audience who are not satisfied by our answer.
Eric: I think we even derive from this question is that because there are times that sellers may also see suppressed buy box when some listings are just suppressed and the buy box suppressed. When that happens, AI does deal with that and deals very intelligently. You would try to set a price that could actually get sold when it’s not being in the buy box instead of being the other offers. Yes, AI does learn a lot of the intricacies in the Amazon buy box algorithm and try to replicate that to optimally reprice.
Jim: I love the answer here, and even for those of us who are listening maybe today and they’re thinking that sounds complicated, just imagine this scenario. You’ve got 200, 300, 400 replens, which isn’t hard to do. We teach people how to do this all the time. They go from never selling anything online before to I’ve got a few hundred products I’m selling now. The challenge is just getting shoppers out there and getting the products sent in and just finding the time to do those tasks, but they sell profitably. The next challenge you run into is you’re going through your products frequently and repricing to stay competitive, either up or down. Amazon, last time I checked, I haven’t looked in a while, they offer their own repricer, but all it does is go one direction. They don’t intelligently raise the price back up. Does Amazon still have a repricer? I haven’t seen it in a long time. I think they do.
Samuel: Amazon has – they call it an automated pricing tool. What it does is it has some simple rule-based, but the difference is that once you get the buy box, there’s no more actions you can take. It will not raise your price back up. That’s a difference, because I mean, Amazon’s purpose is to serve its customers and they want to get the lowest price.
Jim: The buyers.
Samuel: The buyers, right? For the sellers, they have a huge – they have traffic and now they’re charging a lot of money for advertising, PPC ads and everything. Now, their goal is not to help Amazon sellers make tons of money. They want to get the customers there the cheapest price and the most competitive price. That’s a big difference. It keeps repricing, like you said, in one direction, we rarely see it ever reprice up. Once you get the buy box, there’s not much settings you can do.
Eric: This is also why you should choose BQool because we care about the Amazon sellers, our customers, and we’re also a customer centric company.
Samuel: Yes, because if the sellers are making money, then they can invest in the tools. Like you mentioned, a lot of the problem is they don’t have enough shoppers. They don’t have enough people prepping for them. They don’t have enough time to do the repricing themselves as well. With a repricer, it saves that time so that they could be spending it on sourcing. I know, Jim, you’re an expert in this field. You have so many different courses, you have a full spectrum starting from replens to go to wholesale even. You build up. That’s why people need a repricer to save you that time so that you can spend a lot of time sourcing. Then you could also spend on the other activities which will help you generate more money. You have a repricing expert, AI repricing, which will continue to help you reprice up so you actually get more profit from those products that you’ve spent a lot of time packing and sending them in.
Jim: It’s one of those tools that, if you use it properly, it pays for itself very, very quickly. That’s absolutely what we’re talking about, it increases the dollars per hour that you’re making out of your business. We’ve covered a lot of good ground here. I don’t want to leave out anything that you guys were hoping to talk about. I’m looking over a few topics that we agreed we were going to discuss. I think we shot them around and hit most of them. What are some things that – what are some good habits that sellers should get into? This is a question we haven’t hit yet. For daily, weekly, monthly, I’ve got a repricer now. How much attention do I pay to it? Is this set it and forget it? Each time I add a new ASIN, I throw it into the system or are there some daily, weekly, monthly tasks that I should be taking care of?
Samuel: I think there’s definitely some things, like maintenance, you have to oil your engine. You also want to check your listings because we’re all diligent and we want to be professional. On a monthly basis, what you could do is you could sort out the buy box win percentage every month. You could see all the ones who are not winning the buy box. You could see why they’re not winning the buy box. Is it the rule? Is it setting? Is your price not being competitive? A lot of people blame the repricer, but sometimes it really depends on the sourcing as well. What you want to do is in our BQool software you could also check the business reports so you see your buy box win percentage. You see the listing performance. You could actually download them, and compare. One of the important filters to do is you want to filter and you want to see all the listings that you have. That competitor below min, which means that your competitors are pricing below your minimum price for all those listings. Those listings, you’re not going to be able to get the buy box typically if your competitor is pricing way below you. You need to check those listings. You might need to even lower the prices for those. Then you can move on into other products that are more profitable down the road. There’s also another setting that you can do on a weekly basis is you can see which of your listings are at the max price. For those listings, you could actually make even more money and you could actually check the competitor comparison to see what is the highest price that’s pricing it at and you could actually price higher so you could actually make more money for those listings that you should gain.
Jim: I want to restate what you just said because I want to make sure – I’m trying to listen with the ears of new sellers. Because one of the first things you told us we have to do, Eric and Samuel, is to go through and assign a minimum and maximum to all of our products. Then the repricer takes over from there depending on how aggressive we want to be. You’re saying from time to time, go in and look at how many of – am I spending a whole lot of time on my minimum price and not selling this item? It means I’ve got competitors. Look, there’s a bunch of competitors below me. They found a better source or maybe Amazon jumped on and bought 50,000 units and so my good price is not good anymore. Time to just get rid of that stuff. Same story, is my maximum price not high enough? I could be sitting on my maximum day after day after day. It’s selling, winning the buy box at my maximum price. I need to bump that up, get the margin where I could get it. Just rephrasing what you just said from my own vantage point of you have to keep an eye on those guardrails that you set up because they may need to be expanded or shrunk or moved.
Samuel: Another thing to look at is you can look at – definitely focus on the ones that you’re repricing that’s active, your active listings. You could see the ones that you have a lot of quantity. For those products that have a lot of quantity that you’re still not selling, then you might need to go in and you might do some additional calculation. We actually have a free profit calculator that pulls in the Amazon referral fees, the Amazon fees, for you to calculate. You could actually calculate your min price and max prices very accurately, especially for those products that you have a large quantity of.
Another thing is to look at which products – which rule is really working for that type of product. If your buy box is above 50% for some of the products you’re selling, then you have to go out and source more of those products because you’re winning the buy box for those products and you’re selling them out. Those products will be your best performers as well. That’s definitely something that you can check on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis. We also have the business reports. Then that could be – you could look at that on a monthly basis. What you’ll find is once you switch to AI repricer, just after a day or two for some of the listings, it will start repricing. You will really see the activity right on that listing. You’ll see that it reprices a lot more and it will reprice up a lot more. You could really see the difference just by looking at that daily.
Eric: Yeah, and much easier to set up, too.
Samuel: Yeah, it’s much easier to set up a listing.
Eric: Yeah, I would say less maintenance.
Samuel: For the ones that you’re not winning the buy box, you should review those on a monthly basis, for sure. Then definitely there’s also business reports you could see what are the rules that you’re doing, whether you need to switch to different rules. Maybe the rules that you’re setting are not aggressive enough and you have to make some changes. One last thing to do is you could actually set – when you get new listings in Amazon, you could actually automate, you could set automatic minimum and automatic maximum. You could actually set these by default. When these new listings are pulled in from Amazon, then I would check the min to the max. I think it’s best to still do it individually unless all of the products that you sourced you already have a certain margin that you’ve already sourced. Because every product could be a little bit different and you might want to make some minor adjustments. That’s our recommendation to do on a daily, on a weekly, on a monthly basis.
Jim: This has been fantastic. I’m doing a difficult balancing act in my head right now because I would love to spend time just for my own benefit, but I’m afraid that’s getting into the weeds too much for the general audience listener. In general terms, let’s do this. If I wanted to become very educated on how to take full advantage of what your tool can do, what BQool is capable of, how much time am I going to have to spend, assuming I’m of average intelligence? Do you guys have training material videos to go through? What am I getting myself into to become a repricing expert or maybe just good enough at it that I can off load confidently as a 90% automated task? There’s some weekly and monthly things I’m going to have to do I’m going to keep an eye on.
I love that you mentioned, Samuel, as you gather your thoughts to answer that question, you mentioned sort your inventory. It’s easily done in seller central. Sort your inventory from top to bottom. What do I have the most of? How’s it doing? That’s where most of my money is sitting today is that one that’s got the most units. How is it doing? You need to do that, if not daily, frequently. Your tool helps to make intelligent decisions on this. If I want to become really good with a repricer and take full advantage of it, what’s the educational curve look like? What am I committing myself to here?
Eric: I think the best way to be the expert at repricing or not just be adequate is to watch Samuel’s videos, our YouTube channel definitely. You can always contact BQool. We have great supports and we can hand hold you to set out all the rules. I think the most important thing in using a repricer is to get the knowhow. When you have the knowhow, you start developing your own skill set in setting the repricer and also you have more understanding on how your prices can be repriced and to ultimately win the buy box.
Samuel: I think it really depends. I’m going to answer this question in two parts. The first part would be let’s say you’re a relatively new seller and you maybe have about 100 listings. Using the 80-20 principle, you’re going to focus 20% of your listings, the ones that have tons of quantity, the ones that are making you the profits, the ones that you have good ROI, the ones that you could actually double, maybe 100% ROI in some of them, you’re going to focus on those. That’s going to be 20%. Then it’s very, very simple to go in and just set the min, the max, and then pick a rule. It’s really simple. You can do 20%, do the setting, you could do it in about ten minutes. Then you just have to pick the rule. If you’re picking the rule, you can look at our guidelines. That in itself, the whole process after you get it set up, I would say maybe a few hours maybe and within two days because the first day you’re going to be downloading all your listings. That’s if you’re a new seller maybe with 100 listings.
Let’s say you’re an advanced seller, let’s say someone like you, Jim. Maybe you have thousands of listings. In that case, it would really depend. If you’ve gone through the work of setting the min and max before, then you could actually import them using an upload file. That’s really quick. Once you put it into the – we have an upload template and we have videos that teaches you how to put in all the data, then you could actually import that into BQool. We also have the Inventory Lab integration which pulls in all the cost for you. For the people who haven’t set the min and max, if you’re using Inventory Lab, you would pull that from Inventory Lab to pull the cost so you have all the cost. Then you could use the profit calculator to set your min and max. You could also set it on an Excel sheet and import that in. If you set the min and max before already, then you can import that in and get used to our interphase and using the rules. That can take a couple of days as well.
If you have to reset all the min and max, because that’s what takes the longest amount of time, we also have a bulk upload feature, a bulk setting feature. For the bulk setting feature, the process is you would group them into different groups depending on how much margin that you want to make, how much ROI, and then you do the settings for that. It really depends on how many listings – how many types of categories do you have. If you had just a few categories, then it would be pretty quick. If it’s complicated, then it would take longer amounts of time. That’s the different type of sellers, very detailed explanation there.
Jim: What I just heard you say, my question was how much time do I have to spend educating myself, not a whole lot. There’s some videos you can watch, things you can learn. The nice thing here is the AI, the artificial intelligence, is taking care of the heavy lifting. The real work is just getting your listings imported in and getting the minimums and maximums set up. If you’ve never done that before, there’s going to be a little work doing that. If you’ve got it somewhere else, either Inventory Lab or Amazon itself, you have your minimums and maximums set up, it’s going to import right over. That’s the only heavy lifting really. It’s not like you have a steady six to ten hours of repricing philosophy.
I love something you hit on, too, Samuel. I think there’s some good generic advice in there for all of us, the 80-20 rule, the Pareto Principle, if you take a good look at your data, this applies to all of us at any size, 20% of our efforts are producing 80% of our results. That’s true if you’ve got a list of 100 ASINs or 1,000 or 10,000 ASINs, 80% of your revenue results and excitement is coming from those top 20% percent. Pay attention to them. I would also say, this is just some generic advice for all of us, look at that bottom 20%. They’re causing you a lot of unnecessary work. The other 80% of your work could be coming from that bottom 20% that’s just deadweight. It may be time to chop it off. A good repricer is going to help you identify that. If you’re lowering the price and still not getting sales, don’t blame the repricer, like you guys said. Maybe you have some bad products in there. It’s time to chop off that bottom 20%. Do that frequently. It’s just a big waste of time that’s dragging the whole thing down.
Beautiful, here’s another question I had for you guys. Just jumping around randomly, but these are things I think of when I see popular topics. When it comes to repricing, I’ve heard it said, and some people swear by what I’m about to say is true, if a product is just sitting there. Nothing’s happening. It’s not exciting. It looks good on Keepa. The data looks good, but it’s just not selling. It’s just not winning the buy box. Maybe you even have a repricer set up. Is there anything to wiggling the price around, bumping it up a penny, down a penny, up a dime, down a dime, just to get Amazon’s attention? Hey, we’re moving the price. We call it wiggling the price method. Have you guys ever seen any evidence one way or the other if there’s anything to that?
Eric: Interesting, we do have schedules, don’t we?
Samuel: We do have a schedule function. This is more of an advanced tip, but we’re going to share about this anyway. We have an oscillation strategy so you could actually set a scheduler to reset your price to the max. It’s going to attempt to try to move up the average prices of this listing. Let’s say you’re selling a pair of Airmax shoes. It’s priced down to maybe $89.99. It’s been there for a while. You could actually set a scheduler to, let’s say, at midnight, at 3 or 4 a.m. where there’s very few people, and you could reset it to the max price in an attempt to move the price up. In general, if you were to do that manually, you would have to go in and just set it yourself manually, like you said, the wiggle room, but if you’re using the AI and you have the min and the max, there’s enough area, then it would actually move the prices so you’ll see a lot more repricing.
Jim: Can you bump it up a percent? Does it have to be a cent dollar when you bump it up? I’m asking because I know for a fact, Rich Potter, he’s doing our provenwholesalesourcing.com training for us. That’s something he does every morning. I think he’s using BQool. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure he is. Every morning, it sounds like that’s what he’s doing. He said he bumps all his prices up and hoping his competitors will go, “Oh, wow, we’re up there now,” and follow up. If they don’t, well, he goes back down into where he was to have a shot at the buy box. Could that be a percentage or does it have to be a set dollar amount?
Samuel: It’s a setting where you can actually set –
Eric: It can be a percentage or a set dollar amount.
Samuel: It can be a percentage. It could be a specific set amount. It could also go to your max or a fixed amount as well. You could actually do all that setting, but the important part is to combine the AI repricer with that, because once you change that, you want to quickly get that buy box again because you might lose the buy box a little bit, but you want to get it back right away. It’s important to –
Jim: If the other seller isn’t following you up –
Samuel: If they follow you, that’s great.
Jim: If they follow you, that’s great. We’re all happy up here now. I love it because just to get into the land of what’s legal and what isn’t, if I were to get on the phone and call those other three Amazon sellers and say, “Hey, guys, I think if we all bumped our price up about 40%, we’d all still be doing great,” that’s actually illegal. It’s called price fixing. You’re not allowed to do that, but I can raise my price if I want and hope they notice. If they do and they raise their price, too, now we’re all, assuming the customers are willing to pay that price, the customer ultimately gets the final vote. Are they willing to spend that money? If they are, then we’re all playing at a higher level. We always love to see the buy box price creeping upwards on a handful of sellers. It does happen. Another beautiful scenario I love to see, this is one to throw past you, is when maybe it started off, there were five of us selling the product, then there were three, then two. Now, I’m the only one selling this product. Maybe I’ve got my maximum price. It’s time to start bumping that up. If I change to a new maximum price and it’s just me, do you have a setting that could slowly raise up? I don’t want to jump up $50. I want to jump up $1 or $2 every day. Is there anything like that that could be set up for those ASINs?
Samuel: You could do that in two ways. The first way is do the rule-based where you could actually set a certain percentage, a certain dollar when you have the buy box ownership, when there’s no other competitors. The other way is using the AI. The AI will make sure that, even if there’s new competitors, you’ll still continue to hold on and you could have the buy box. In that scenario, you would pick one of the rules that raises the price, gets you more profit per unit, such as the AI profit booster.
Eric: Profit maximizer, even equalizer sometimes does that.
Samuel: Those would be some of the suggestions to use.
Jim: Those are for us, the Merchant Fulfilled items, where these are some of the bigger tickets, these are items I’m spending maybe $200 or $300 for. When I sell them, I make $60 to $70 after all things are said and done. I’m not sending them to FBA. We’re just keeping them on our own shelf here in this case. On those, I’ve manually been going in, but I’m looking forward to having a setting that could say, okay, we’re not going to get real aggressive chasing the price down, but as we win the buy box, we want to slowly bump the price up. It sounds like it can do just about anything.
Samuel: Our AI repricer is both for FBA and FBM. Just to give you an example, we had a seller who was selling a used book. There’s maybe five different FBM sellers on there. He was an FBA seller. Then there’s a number of other FBA sellers as well. Normally, if you’re an FBM seller, you’re going to have to have a price advantage in order for you to beat out the FBA. That’s just how it works. In this scenario, they used one of the AI repricing rules. I think they used the AI equalizer. What happened is the AI raised this price to go above the FBM but right below one penny under the other FBA who had a better rating, who had more feedback than he did. He was able to get that. He sold the product. That was a very expensive used book, a very special book. It’s about $160 something. He sourced that for just a fraction of that. It’s similar to what you’re mentioning. This is actually an example, a real-world example that you can find from one of our –
Jim: Even on a single unit product, a repricer could be a big advantage. It’s not like these are the only – not using repricer just for the products that you’ve gone in really deep. By definition, a replens business is you’re not going in deep on 95% of the products that you have at any given time. You’ve got a handful of them. The repricer can really help you juggle those prices up and down as needed. I’m super excited about this. I think it’s going to be something that really helps a lot of folks out. I love this budding relationship and partnership that we have with you guys. I love the transparency, how long you’ve been doing it. I’ve come to really learn – I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I’ve got a new found respect for people that have some years under their belt, if you know what I mean. The new guy that comes along with a great flashy story, that doesn’t impress me. Get back to me when you’ve been doing it for seven years because now you actually know how the world works. You don’t just have a flashy story. You guys have been doing this a decade. I love working with you guys. You’re actually helping my mom and I go through our own account right now and sharpen things up with our 1,000+ listings. I really appreciate that as well. Anything you guys want to put out there before we start to wrap this up? Maybe we should re-mention the special offer and how folks can get that and what’s involved with that. We mentioned it at the very beginning of the show in the intro, but let’s hit that again and just remind folks what you’ve got for them.
Samuel: I think you’re absolutely right. You’ve been in the business, definitely one of the top coaches, more than 17 years in this. If you’re in here, a lot of these guys are moving to cryptocurrency, other products, but you’re focused on Amazon business. You’ve given so much value and advice. There’s people out there, they’re the new guys, they’re selling their courses for thousands and thousands of dollars. They’re taking your courses and repackaging them.
Jim: You don’t have to tell me. I see it all day. That’s right.
Samuel: Yeah, some of the things that we want to share, I’m going to get Eric, his feedback here, what is something that we want to share with the audience?
Eric: Yeah, you’re one of the most well known figure in the Amazon seller space and we do get a lot of users asking do we have any collaboration with Jim and My Silent Team? Yes, this time we do.
Jim: We finally made it happen.
Eric: Yeah, finally. It’s about time, right? Anyone who signs up from Jim, your link, your landing page, you’re going to get 30 days free trial for repricing central, so that’s 30 days. You get a full one month free trial to test our repricing central so you can basically get a repricer from Jim, from the landing page. Remember to contact us because if you do sign up from Jim’s landing page, the link, and then come to us and ask if you can be eligible for extra AI listings for the AI repricer, we can grant you that for free as well. We have an offer right now that we can offer you 1,000 AI listings if you do sign up from Jim’s link. That’s a pretty good deal. We have a lot of customers always asking us if we can get extra listings for AI, we could easily say no, but this time, if you do sign up from Jim’s link, you’ll get 1,000 AI listings.
Samuel: It has to be from Jim’s link.
Jim: That link is silentjim.com/repricer. We’ll put it in the show notes as well along with the graphic that Samuel shared with us earlier and any of the resources we talked about today. That’s silentjim.com/repricer. We mentioned it in the introduction as well. If you’re jogging or if you’re driving right now, no need to slam the brakes and write it down. Just go to silentjim.com. Go to the show notes for this episode. It’s all there for you. You guys have put together an incredible deal for those who want to either transition to an artificial intelligence repricer from whatever it is they’re using now or for those who are thinking it’s probably time for me to start using a repricer. I’m going through and changing prices too much in this business. It’s time to automate this thing. It’s going to pay for itself very quickly. Beautiful, very well done today, guys. Am I leaving anything else out? I loved spending time with you today. I hope everyone else feels like they got as good of an education as I did. I definitely learned some new things today. I’m excited to get into BQool as we’re getting it set up on our own account and adjust some of these settings myself. What else do you guys want to end with? Any other final thoughts before we close up?
Samuel: I think one of the things that Eric told me earlier is you need to be persistent. It’s like running a marathon, the Amazon business. Then you have to build block by block. You want to grow your Amazon empire one step at a time. When you first start out, you might use OA, RA, and then maybe move on to replens and then somewhere between, you start using a repricer to get you more. You ought to join a community or group to have the right coaches, the right people teaching you how to source, go find Jim. You don’t want to give up when you first – maybe some of the products you sell are not making money, but you want to move to a different product. You don’t stay loyal to one product unless it’s a product that continues to give you profit. That’s one last thing we wanted to give. Anything else you want to add?
Eric: I think you summed it up really well. Also if you want to learn sourcing, sourcing smartly, you have to find the right coach, and Jim is the guy.
Jim: Thanks for that, guys. I really appreciate it. From one guy who’s been around in this industry for a long time to another couple guys who have been doing it the right way for a long time with a great reputation, keep going strong. I love the advice that you gave. Slow and steady wins the race, basically. We say it around here all the time. There’s just no such thing as an opportunity where you just hit the ground running and make a bunch of money fast. Business is work. It’s risk. It’s a long-term commitment. This is a beautiful business model. If something better comes along, I’m going to start talking about it. The reason I’ve been talking about Amazon for 15 – well, actually, Amazon about 12 years now. We’ve been coaching for 17, but Amazon about 12 years, it’s because it’s the best business model out there. If that ever changes, we may have to go do something else, but right now, it still is.
You guys are offering a great tool to our community for those who are taking this business seriously. I think you’re going to see a lot of new people coming on board. I hope they take full advantage of the offer you guys have. Silentjim.com/repricer is the deal. It’s the repricer that we’re using on our account. Just for full transparency, too. We have other repricers. We have a team of about 100 people when you look at our coaches and our consultants, our expert content creators. If you want to hear an interesting debate, get us all in a room talking about repricers, because some people, they’ve been grandfathered in for years on their favorite, they have all their settings or whatever. I’m a BQool guy. That’s where we’re going now is with BQool. That’s what we’re using here. A good number of other leaders on our team are as well. It’s a great place to go. Your business is the strongest relationship we have right now with a repricer as well is with you guys. I appreciate you coming on and spending the time. For those who don’t know, these guys are up in the middle of the night as I’m recording. You guys are still awake. I don’t know if you’re on caffeine or what. It’s the middle of the night for you because you’re in Taiwan and we’re in the US. Thank you for that. I really appreciate it.
Samuel: We’re passionate about repricer and so it gets us excited talking about it and seeing all the customers being successful. We’re very excited. We’re going to be having some new product launches very, very shortly which is going to greatly even improve your results even more. It’s not a one-time deal. We continue to upgrade. We continue to improve our systems. If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know and we’ll be able to implement them for you.
Jim: That’s exciting. It’s very much a partnership between your engineers and what you guys have built and our community and the other sellers. Repricers are custom built perfect for people, especially doing some of those models that we train, the Replens model, which we’re better at than anyone in the world. That’s custom made for repricers because of all the ASINs you’re dealing with, all the products you’re dealing with. Great job, good hanging out with you guys today.
I’m going to talk to the listeners for just a second as we wrap this one up. Let Samuel and Eric get some sleep because it’s the middle of the night there. I’m just getting started with my day. It’s been a true pleasure hanging out with you guys. For all the listeners, thanks for hanging out with us today. I know we got a little nerdy, a little technical maybe with repricers, but ultimately, it’s about you making more money and automating and systemizing your business. That’s what we talked about today. If we lost you a little bit along the way, we got into the weeds a little bit, hey, that’s okay. Just make a note to yourself, hey, if I’ve got more than just a handful of products that I’m trying to sell on Amazon, I could make more money if I use a repricer. BQool is the one I should go check out and turn on. Spend a couple hours, like Samuel said, getting set up. Then after that, check on it every once in a while, tweak a few things, and it’s doing the heavy lifting for you, helping you win the buy box and stay competitive. That was the whole point of the message today. Maybe you could just skip and listen to that 30 seconds and got it. That’s what we talked about today. God bless all the business-building warriors out there. It was a pleasure hanging out with you today. Thanks to my guests. They were awesome. We will have another awesome episode like this one again for you soon. Talk to you then.
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