One of the many reasons sellers choose RepricerExpress over Appeagle is the significant savings in cost. A seller repricing more than 250 SKUs on Appeagle will be charged a minimum $100 per month, with RepricerExpress, you can reprice up to 2,500 SKUs for just $55 (£39)…that’s a saving of $45 per month or $540 per year!
We believe our software and support are the best on the market but what does FBA seller Jeff Roth from Scan on the Side think? In the post below, Jeff shares his thoughts on RepricerExpress vs Appeagle.
As promised I am ready to discuss my experience using two of the more popular repricer programs on the market, RepricerExpress & Appeagle. I know a lot of Amazon sellers have considered using a repricing platform but maybe aren’t at that level yet with inventory or just haven’t taken the time to get started.
For openness sake be aware that I used the two week free trial period offered for each of these programs and had no additional access or control than any new user would and clearly there’s a lot more to each platform that I would learn beyond two weeks if I stayed on each longer. In my thoughts though I know that many sellers will make their decisions based on their trial periods and that these two weeks ARE important for both platforms to turn free into paid users.
Getting Started
Sign-up was simple as can be for both Appeagle and RepricerExpress. Both platforms allow you to use the trial without requiring any credit card information which makes many people much more comfortable with getting started, myself included. Each requires you to essentially allow them access to your Amazon account by entering tokens and auth codes which are provided in a very easy to understand manner so kudos to both.
This could have been a mess but each walks you through step by step in this stage and makes it foolproof. One small note I did make was that with RepricerExpress, I received an email from them once my inventory had been integrated within their system and I would begin seeing pricing changes based on my set rules. I don’t recall receiving such notification from Appeagle (not that I recall) and wasn’t sure exactly when my items were actually being repriced. However, this is not a big deal because I didn’t expect big changes in the early hours of starting but just a note.
You could save $540 per year by switching from Appeagle to RepricerExpress
Setting Up the Rules
Both platforms rely on the specific rules or settings set forth by the user (you) to determine how to reprice the items in your inventory. While this sounds like a straightforward process there’s a lot more that you need to take into account with your repricing rules to make things run smoothly. If you’re ready to sell things basically at any cost and win the Buy Box, each platform has a ‘Buy Box’ setting where it will reprice your items to go and get the Buy Box at any cost. Not many sellers will use this option unless you’re just ready to dump inventory and get some money back.
RepricerExpress Details
I started with RepricerExpress first in the timeline of the trials so I will start with their service details first. Let me say this first and this goes for BOTH repricers: If you have a decent sized inventory, it will take some time to set up your rules for all of your inventory to ensure you don’t make errors in repricing too low or too high. Don’t skimp on this time.
RepricerExpress Settings
There are a lot of settings that you can play around with when creating a repricing rule for specific items and smartly you can set up different rules for different inventory items depending on your range of inventory. Of course you can set proper currency for different countries of origin. For basic users, what’s nice about their setup is that it is extremely easy to set your rules. They allow you to set a min and max % from the current price that you will allow the program to reprice within so I played around with 20% as the high and low point for every item in our inventory. So, let’s say I have a toy that’s currently listed for $20. I set my min % to 20 and max to 20% to allow the program to edit the price either way depending upon my competition’s pricing. I would rather not have gone through manually and determine which items to set this rule for so while this was a very easy thing to setup, the universal nature of this setting forced me to manually set repricing rules for many of my higher priced items that I did not want to drop 20% in price. This might be a bit of a nuisance for users with tens of thousands of items in inventory but for us once I went through our inventory and manually edited the min/max price those higher priced items all was fine. Of course Repricerexpress allows you to upload an excel file with your set min/max prices for those with larger inventories and needs.
Next, you can determine who you want to compete with in terms of Amazon, other FBA sellers and MFN sellers. For each, you can set up rules as to how you want the software to reprice against that type of seller. For example, you can choose to beat Amazon’s price by .01 or match the price of the lowest FBA seller while ignoring all MFN sellers. You can also choose to Win the Buy Box which ignores all other rules and aggressively attempt to get you the Buy Box. Users can choose to reprice against only the same item condition (New/Used). What’s great about their settings is that you can also choose to reprice against sellers with specific metrics meaning repricing against sellers who have at least X Seller Feedbacks or a Seller Rating of a certain % or above. You can also reprice against sellers from specific countries, only compete with Featured Sellers, exclude/include specific sellers and details to truly pinpoint your strategies for each inventory item.
The most important setting with RepricerExpress is the Scenarios area. These are basically ‘If this then that’ scenarios that determine when or when not to reprice. For example, if there’s no competition do you want to just want the price to sit or do you want to go to your Max price to potentially get higher margins. If the competition is below your min price, do you want to go to your min price, not reprice or go to the ‘Next Best Seller’s’ price. What if competition matches your price? What if you’re the Buy Box winner? Do you want to up your price by a certain % or just reprice as normal? These are decisions that can only be made by you in trial and error to determine the best practice.
Appeagle Details
Now moving on to Appeagle. I want to be upfront and say that I know many other professional Amazon sellers who use Appeagle and swear by it. Appeagle provides most of the same targeted repricing strategies in terms of when and who you choose to reprice against just like Repricerexpress does. Unfortunately for me in where I am in our business I found the Appeagle dashboard to be a little less user-friendly as compared to RepricerExpress. For Appeagle, the setting up a % max/min within the dashboard was unavailable within my initial account. In order to access these more advanced repricing rules I inquired to their customer service by phone and they had to change my account type which was not an option apparent on the dashboard (Note: Customer service said this was coming soon). Customer service was excellent and handled this without pause but it wasn’t a step that many others would take. Even then, the only way to set up a % min/max price rule was to upload an excel spreadsheet with buy costs and other pricing data and once uploaded to set up repricing rules from those data figures. I did this and once set up things began to sell through. For more advanced sellers with time to spare for these tasks I see no issues here whatsoever. I don’t mean to shortchange Appeagle and I know it is a very powerful and workable repricer but just realize for a new user coming in blind it was a bit more work within that trial period.
Actual Repricing Results
As for the actual repricing on both platforms things went very smoothly. Items sold nicely through both channels and I did not see a big difference in selling frequency while using the exact same settings on each. I know if I would have allowed a large % min that sales would have been much higher but I did not want to lose too much margin.
I hope you got some good info from my experience. Realize these were two-week trials that were done by me on a part-time basis so there’s way more to each platform in terms of setup that I could ever have realized within the trials.
Moving Forward
I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear that I will be continuing to use the RepricerExpress platform moving forward. In fact, I will begin to go more in-depth into their platform and attempt to do a monthly blog post on my experiences using their system and giving our readers some specifics in terms of settings that we will be using and our results.
Related: 15 Reasons Sellers Choose to Use Amazon Repricing Software
