Anti-dumping policy is an essential element of any competitive repricing system. The concept of anti-dumping is a set of measures to prevent the sale of items at artificially lowered prices. In the context of our system, these measures are aimed at preventing rapid and unjustified depreciation of listings.

Why does listing dumping occur?

As we know, the price of the offer on Amazon is one of the main factors for getting into BuyBox, where 90% of sales actually come from. Therefore, competing sellers are fighting for the best price positions by lowering their prices and getting ahead of each other in pursuit of the coveted Buy Box. This is usually achieved through the appropriate repricing settings that are provided by different services, and even Amazon itself. Since almost all sellers use automatic repricing, as soon as the price of an item on the listing goes down, the rest of the offers are also pulled up to the minimum price. It is possible that a dumping seller will get some sales, but because of the use of such an aggressive repricer, the minimum listing price in a short time drops to the minimum profit, thereby devaluing the listing and minimizing profits for all sellers.

To prevent such a depreciation of listings maintained by the system, a set of measures was developed that do not allow users of the system to reprice the first position on the listing in automatic mode. This achieves a healthy balance of competition between sellers and profitability, and the ability to receive a BuyBox depends to a large extent on the health of the seller’s account, the speed of order processing, delivery, etc. Thus, listings do not depreciate at lightning speed and are profitable for a long time, which allows sellers to spend less effort looking for new margin links.

In the context of the above, the question often arises – How to set the price below competitors on the listing if I want to sell cheaper? Of course, there is such an opportunity. To do this, in the inventory link settings, we have the Preferred Price option. You can set any acceptable selling price (within the limits of the min \ max profit settings) of the product, and the platform will add your offer with this price. But you can set the Preferred Price exclusively in manual mode in the inventory link settings, excluding the possibility of automatic dumping.

Customizable minimum price

The opposite problem of listing dumping is a rarer phenomenon, but still affecting sales – artificially inflating listing prices. This is especially noticeable on monopoly listings. Suppose for a long time you are selling on a listing with a set price, sales are going on, the listing is profitable. But suddenly a competitor appears who overstates the price, say, twice. According to the rules of the anti-dumping policy described above, the system brings your price up to the price of the first competitor. Most likely, being a monopolist on the listing, you already kept a high percentage of profits, and an additional increase in the selling price will lead to the listing becoming uncompetitive and losing sales. To avoid such a situation, you can use the Minimum price of the first position option. This new option determines the minimum price that your offer can have on the Amazon listing while on the 1st position.

The minimum price of the first position is the basis of the anti-dumping policy. In fact, this option allows you to select the minimum price that the platform will allow you to set on your offer during automatic repricing. You can choose one of the following options:

• First seller – the price is determined by the price of the first seller on the listing (excluding yourself). This is the default setting and defines the standard anti-dumping policy described earlier in this article.
• Historic Low – is the lowest price ever recorded for this listing (since the introduction in July 2021!).
• My Historical Low is the lowest price you have ever set for this listing.

The Minimum price of the first position option is available only for the Best Possible Position strategy when the Maximum Price for the current position option is disabled.

Competition between users

At the moment, our platform has such a number of users that often there are two, three, or even more of our users on one listing, and the number of such listings is growing rapidly with the growth of our user base. As you can easily imagine, the presence of several users in the listing may create all sorts of conflicts, primarily in the context of repricing. Therefore, back in 2017, we introduced a special policy to prevent internal competition:

• if two (or more) of our sellers meet on the same listing at the same position, the system will prevent their mutual competition (the Repricing Step option will be ignored). An exception is the situation when sellers have different subscriptions (Professional vs Basic) – in this case, a seller with a Professional subscription will have priority in the fight for this position.
• if two of our sellers meet on the same listing, but in different positions, the system will not interfere, since in fact the sellers are competing for different positions. Example: if, according to their settings, “Seller A” gets to the 2nd position, and “Seller B” gets to the 4th position, then these sellers are not direct competitors, and the system will not interfere.

Thus, at the platform as detailed and flexible as possible, with the possibility of variable settings, measures are implemented to prevent mutual competition and prevent dumping on listings. We are for fair competition and stable profitability!