ProfitSmarts lowers the price on Amazon listings that have lost the Featured Offer, and then measures whether that sold more, against listings of yours it deliberately leaves alone.
The Featured Offer is the buy button most customers click. Plenty of tools will chase it for you, and they charge for how many listings they manage. None of them can tell you what they earned you. That measurement is what this is for.
What it measured, so far
2.40x at day 27
Listings that got a price cut sold at 2.40 times the rate of matching listings that were held back, at day 27.
| Sold | Rate | |
|---|---|---|
| Cut to recover the Featured Offer | 135 of 343 | 39.4% |
| Held back, never repriced | 10 of 61 | 16.4% |
That is 2.40x at day 27. Fisher exact test, two-sided: p = 0.00045. Intention-to-treat means every listing is counted in the group it was first put in, whether or not the cut held.
Raising prices instead was measured the same way. At day 27, 7 of 45 raised listings sold, against 1 of 12 held back. p = 1.0. There is no evidence that raising prices did anything, and we report it that way.
The multiple shrinks with time. Held-back listings sell eventually too. The same experiment read 3.20x at day 14 and 2.40x at day 27, with nothing wrong. A multiple quoted without a day count isn't a result.
This is one seller. They bought stock at about $0.40 a unit, so a price cut cost them almost nothing in margin. On a shelf with real margin, the same cut can cost more than the extra sale brings in. What carries over to you is the measurement that tells you which one you are, not the 2.40x at day 27.
It was measured against doing nothing. Before this, the seller priced by hand. ProfitSmarts has never been compared with another repricer, and we don't claim it beats one. It is a design-partner product, and we're working with a small number of sellers.
The listings we leave alone
Before anything is priced, about 15% of your eligible listings are chosen at random and set aside. For as long as we work together, we never change their price.
- What it is
- A random share of the listings that would otherwise have been repriced. It is drawn once, before the first price change, and it never changes after that.
- What it costs you
- Those listings don't get the help. Some that would have sold after a cut will sell later, or won't sell. That is real money, and it is yours.
- Why it's worth it
- Without it, nobody can tell whether a sale happened because of the price change or would have happened anyway. Every number we report compares your repriced listings with your own held-back ones, from the same shelf over the same days. Take it away and you have a repricer that changes prices and can't tell you whether that helped.
Each kind of change is compared only with held-back listings that would have received the same kind of change. We never compare everything we touched with everything we didn't, because that manufactures a lift that isn't there.
What it will not do
- Change the price of a listing that already holds the Featured Offer.
- Touch a listing in the held-back group.
- Price below a floor worked out from your real unit cost and Amazon's own fee estimates. If Amazon has no fee estimate for a listing, it isn't priced at all.
- Write any price without your explicit, recorded approval of that batch.
Every change is recorded with the price it replaced, and one command puts every price back.
How it starts: a diagnostic that changes nothing
- You authorize ProfitSmarts in Amazon Seller Central.
- It reads your listings and reports. It writes nothing.
- You get one page showing how many of your listings have lost the Featured Offer, what that inventory is worth, and how much of the time you held the Featured Offer over the past year.
No cost, no price changes, nothing at risk. Amazon's authorization screen lists everything the application is allowed to do later, including changing prices. During the diagnostic it does none of that. If you stop there, revoke access in Seller Central and your data is deleted.
Invite only
There's no signup. If you sell on Amazon and reprice by hand or not at all, write and ask for a diagnostic.