In this article I will be sharing what I consider to be the perfect repricing strategies for Amazon FBA booksellers. Perfection will never be achieved with repricing, but this is the best I have come up with so far.

Note: Throughout the duration of this article, we will not be factoring in buy cost as it is really irrelevant in the conversation of repricing for maximum profit and sell through. 

All we care about is getting the most amount of money paid into your bank account from Amazon by using a combination of strategies that allow us to sell books for more profit while preventing Amazon fees that are 100% avoidable like long term storage fees and removal fees.

Also it should also be noted that I will mention the software I recommend for implementing this strategy, but these concepts and strategies can be applied to any software’s on the market if they have the ability.

More profit, faster sales, less fees

In my opinion, a perfect repricing strategy accomplishes the following:

1. You sell your books for the highest price possible without slowing down sell-through rate significantly. Remember there is almost always a trade off between pricing your items higher and the rate at which your inventory sells.

2. You maintain a healthy sell through rate of at least 20% per month. This means if you maintain an inventory of 1000 books, you are selling 200 (20%) each month. This ensures healthy cash flow and prevents high long term storage fees and removal fees.

3. You purge any inventory by repricing to the lowest price possible without exceeding the cost of paying Amazon to remove the book. For example, if you sell a book for $6 and it loses you -$1.50 after Amazon fees, that is much better than paying Amazon $2.20 to remove your book. 

For every 1,000 books you sell at a -$1.50 loss rather than paying a $2.20 removal fee, you are saving $700! For every 10,000, that’s $7,000. Pretty crazy, right? 

Who knew selling books at a loss could save you so much money.

Since this article is about repricing books, I won’t linger too long on the importance of sourcing good books. If your triggers for sourcing books are too lenient, meaning you’re accepting low profit and slow selling books to Amazon, even the best repricing strategy on Earth won’t save you.

The most important part of running a profitable Amazon business is sourcing profitable products.

A good repricing strategy helps you increase your profit margins and sell through rate, it doesn’t magically make slow selling products fly off the shelves.

In business, most of my misery comes during times that I make things overly complicated. There is no reason to add unnecessary complexity to your repricing strategy.

Here is an overview of our strategy:

While listing our books: We initially price books intelligently at prices to make the most profit and still get the sale.

0 – 30 days: We do not price below the initial price set and we compete for buy box. Basically in this phase, we only change price if it is increasing from the initial price set.

30 - 90 days We drop minimum price from the initial price set to $8 and match buy box

90 days + We compete for the buy box, meaning we undercut it by a penny.

Around 150 days... We drop our minimum prices to sell at any loss that is not greater than the disposal or removal fee. 

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Important: Every night (from 2 to 4 am) and afternoon (from 1:00 - 1:30 pm) we reprice up to our maximum price. We set our maximum price at 3x the buy box price.

You only get one chance to price your books initially on Amazon. This is important because if you price your book too low, you can literally bring down the market value because other sellers’ repricers will kick in and match your low ball offer. 

So, the idea of pricing at buy box price and then pricing up higher later is flawed. The opportunity to reprice up later won’t exist.

One time I was in Eastern Tennessee with my mentor Caleb Roth doing a book deal. We were buying books from a college that just closed. During the day, we would scan the books in the school, and at night we’d watch his wife list the books on Amazon while we drank beer (lol, joking… kinda).

I remember watching her scan the books she was listing with ScoutIQ before listing it. I asked her why she did this and she answered “I like to see what ScoutIQ thinks I should sell it for before pricing it.” 

She would scan the book with ScoutIQ and then type in the price ScoutIQ recommended (or a higher or lower price based on her judgment) in the listing software she was using. She was setting all her prices manually before sending the books in to Amazon.

Again, if you price your book too low, then the competition’s repricers might instantly reprice to match your price and now you’re stuck with the market value of the book being at the lower price when you and the other sellers could have enjoyed sales at a higher price.

She was making us more profit by double checking the price each book was initially being listed for.

The initial price set make be the final price set.

Caleb also did an experiment where he listed 2 batches of 100 books. He flipped a coin and assigned batch 2 to be repriced with a repricer, and left batch 1 with the initial prices set, no repricing at all.

Here’s what happened…

Batch 2 (the one being repriced with a repricer) only had slightly more sales than batch 1. Also, 40% of the prices never changed in batch 2, meaning the initial price set was the price the book stayed at for months even with a repricer.

This suggest the initial prices you set will hold (and hopefully sell). This is why setting initial prices when sending books to Amazon is so important.

Now we’ll go over some strategies you can consider when initially setting your price and when you set up an automated repricing strategy to make more money.

There are a few scenarios where you are just throwing money away when it comes to pricing your books on Amazon. I’ll start with the “Prime bump.”

The “Prime bump” refers to the difference in price between the lowest non prime price on Amazon and the lowest prime price.

For anyone that doesn’t know what a Prime offer is, it’s an offer that has 1-2 days Prime shipping. Customers are willing to pay a premium for these books, and Amazon really incentivizes customers to buy these books by displaying them in the buy box.

If you’re using Amazon’s FBA program, your offers will be displayed with a blue Prime check.

The important thing for you to know is you have the ability to sell your books at higher prices than your non-FBA competition because Amazon prioritizes your sale over the other offers by placing you in the Buy Box which gets more clicks than non-FBA offers.

Let’s look at a few scenarios where you might be leaving money on the table by not pricing as high as you could.

Example 1: You buy a fast-selling book that has zero FBA offers. That means there are no offers with that blue prime check indicating 1-2 day fast shipping. 

Here’s a secret, for a fast selling book, if you are the only FBA offer you can price this book 20 – 200% higher than the lowest price and still get the sale. It’s pretty ridiculous. 

One time I sold a Jewish set of books for $2000 when the lowest offer was $1300. I literally made an extra $700 just because I was the only FBA offer.

There is no rule set in stone for how much higher you should price your book for if there are no FBA offers, just price it higher.

The listing software Go2lister (created by yours truly) notifies you when a book has no FBA offers and automatically prices your book 20% higher when a book likely has no FBA competition. 

It highlights the book purple so you know to dig into it and price your book a bit higher.

You can really milk a lot more profit out of your inventory if you price books without Prime competition higher. You get to manufacture your own margin.

Advanced nuanced issue: because repricers only have access to the buy box price and the lowest 20 offers that Amazon API returns, if you send your book in to match buy box price when there is no FBA competition and win the buy box, your repricer is blind to the other prime offers.

So, unless you program your repricer differently, it will treat the situation as if there are potentially other FBA offers above you instead of raising your price to get more profit. More on strategies to program your repricer to do this later.

Again, Go2Lister prices your books at a 20% premium when there are no Prime offers so you can capture more profit. Sign up for a 14 day free trial here.

Be patient and wait for other sellers to sell out

If you’re willing to be patient, you can sell your books at higher prices. There is a time and place for this patience, however.

If there are 100 sellers on a listing all priced at $10 and the book doesn’t sell very fast, don’t be patient. Price your book at $10 or less and get the sale.

If there is a book, however, with the lowest priced 3 sellers on the listing priced at $15, $19, and $24, then consider pricing at $24 and waiting for the first two sellers to sell out. You could sell the book for an extra $9 simply for waiting for the other sellers to sell out.

At Miami Sellers Conference in 2022, Scott Needham shared how he raised his profit margins from 14% - 18% simply by raising his prices at night for a couple hours. He sells $40,000,000 + per year, so we are talking an increase in millions of dollars in profit.

When you price up at night you give your inventory’s prices a chance to recover. Here are a few examples of how pricing up at night can make you more money:

1. Let’s say you’re on a listing and you are the only FBA offer. Remember that your repricer is “blind” to knowing if there is 1 FBA offer or 25 FBA offers because the Amazon API only shares the lowest 20 used offers period. Usually FBA offers hang out at higher prices, so they are not in the lowest 20 offers therefore not visible to your repricer. By pricing up temporarily at night there is a high chance you win the buy box at a higher price. The next day when your repricer goes back to it’s regular repricing settings, it will see that you are in the buy box and leave the price there.

2. If your competition is smart they will raise their prices at night too. Or at least have some type of repricing setting to price up occasionally. If you and the competition price up at the same time, the overall price of the listing will go up.

3. When your competition has bad seller feedback and is not buy box eligible, you could win the buybox at a much higher price than them. So when you price up at night and win the buy box, your repricer will stay at that price (as long as it’s competing for buybox) through the next day.

These are just 3 scenarios where pricing up at night will increase your prices therefore increasing your profits. There are other scenarios as well, but the overall idea is you give the listings price a chance to recover.

This one is interesting. If you raise your prices in the afternoon, there are a portion of customers who will buy your item at a higher price. 

This is because customers are constantly adding items from your store to their cart, and if you happen to increase your price while your item is in their cart, they pay the higher price. 

Don’t worry, the customer gets notified of the price increase before they purchase and they can choose to continue or remove the item.

The purpose of this strategy is two-fold. First, we want to capitalize on the opportunity to sell our items at a higher price via the situation I mentioned above, and secondly we just want to give the market a chance to breath.

If you price your items up and the low offers sell out, the price of the overall listing goes up. We don’t really get to enjoy this benefit at night because not many people are buying products on Amazon from 2-4 am. 

During the afternoon, however, it is likely that other offers will sell out when you price up.

We only price up for 30 minutes in the afternoon, but this is enough to give us a chance to raise our items’ sales price.

In conclusion, this is what I think is the best repricing strategy for booksellers to make the most money. 

If you want my team to set up this repricing strategy we will do that free of charge for Go2lister users. Just email us at support@go2lister.com (make sure you have an active account that has been charged at least 1 time). We use a software called ChannelMAX, this was recommended to me by Scott Needham and when I switched to ChannelMAX from RepriceIT my units sold per day doubled permanently. I think it's just an overall more powerful repricer, because I didn't change my repricing rules that drastically. 

If you want to give smart pricing a whirl, sign up for a free trial of Go2lister here! https://www.Go2lister.com 

Please comment your thoughts below or feel free to email me privately at romertheroamer@gmail.com.