The effortless way to manage price updates to your online store

If you are receiving new price files frequently from multiple suppliers, you are likely spending time each month adjusting the new prices for your business and uploading these to your site.

“I get updates on pricing from all of my suppliers every month. Updating pricing each month takes way too much time with hundreds of thousands of products and 10-20 price files”.

Shopify Community Discussion Site

For many, this process is lengthy, using key team members inefficiently on repetitive manual tasks. It is also risky, with bulk editors and uploads on several platforms notoriously finicky. You don’t need to dig very deep onto platform community pages to hear store owners share their horror stories of unwanted side effects to other attribute fields and other issues on their sites after a bulk edit or upload!

It is also an area forgivably easy to make mistakes or miss details. For instance, missing a new price file that has come in while someone was on holiday or a hectic week where price updates don’t get prioritized.

Unfortunately, if you don’t keep up with price updates, you’ll likely find yourself facing the consequences. For instance, you may not fulfill your suppliers’ MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) obligations, causing issues with these vital relationships. If prices have increased, you can quickly damage your margin by selling things underpriced. Or conversely, you could be pricing yourself higher than the competition if the price has decreased and you haven’t updated this to your site.

With Google shopping and the general ease of comparing prices online, this is something you particularly need to be careful to avoid.

Automating price updates offer a straightforward value payback for your business month after month. There are many apps to consider that are available to help with pricing management. Or you can consider an option like Vesta, which provides a broad range of functionality to automate your wider product data operations. Specific to pricing, with Vesta you can

1. Ingest the new pricing changes from wherever they are available, for example,

• FTP
• API
• Scraping
• Price Files

2. Choose to either accept/reject the price changes or let them flow through.

3. Add price calculations. These can be specific to each supplier and as complicated as needed. Eg

If the cost price is higher than $50 add 35% margin to cost price and sync with Shopify as the sell price

If cost is lower than $50 add 40% margin to cost price and sync with Shopify as the sell price 

4. Vesta has robust integrations with most eCommerce platforms through which to directly sync new pricing.

You can set these price updates to run as frequently as needed. The frequency can be different for each supplier.

Price uploads are just one area in Vesta where you can add automation to free up your team’s time to focus on more important things. Automation allows key actions to run in the background without intervention. You can have peace of mind that this critical task is in hand and your site is updated. Accurate, complete product information builds trust with your shoppers, so they want to come back time and time again while also protecting your margin and competitiveness.