Did you know that sellers can remain in the ‘offers’ list in the Amazon listing page even when they have no stock?
You might be further surprised to learn that these sellers with no stock can cause your pricing to be reduced. Most automated repricing solutions do not check the stock availability of sellers in the offer list.
Why does this happen?
Amazon will try and force the price down EVEN when they have no stock available. Take this example for a paddling pool which is selling fast in the summer months (see screen shot below).
Here Amazon have no stock and they still appear in the seller list. For this type of impulse purchase, people are unlikely to wait for Amazon to be back in stock in 2 weeks and therefore it make sense NOT to compete with them.
This is a very common tactic employed by Amazon (to drive prices down), particularly in fast moving seasonal products like toys at Christmas.
What you need to do:
There are two fields that sellers use to indicate stock availability.
- A shipping time, indicating the number of hours it will take the seller to ship a product
- An availability type metrics indicating if the product is available now, or in a few weeks
You need to look at both fields to check if the seller has stock available to ship immediately. With xSellco’s Repricer you can set different ways of competing against sellers who have stock available NOW, versus those that are currently out of stock.
