How to compare Walmart repricers and choose the best option for your Walmart Marketplace business.
Walmart repricing in 2023
If you’re looking to ensure you’re using the best technology available in order to power your Walmart Marketplace business into 2022, then let this article be your guide.
Walmart repricing is getting more competitive as the retail giant’s online footprint continues to grow. However, there is still a stark difference in performance amongst the various repricers on the market. Be sure you’re using a software that gives you an edge over other sellers, and not one that simply reacts to the data in the same way as everyone else.
Early Walmart repricers are pretty basic, using info from Walmart’s API to price you below the buy box listing. But a good repricer should do more than this simple workflow. First of all, Walmart’s API sends outdated or incorrect information almost 40% of the time! And second, you should have the ability to control your pricing depending on multiple situations and variables, not just going a penny lower than the current buy box price.
With these needs of the modern seller in mind, some Walmart repricers are getting more sophisticated — relying on more sources of information, collecting their own real-time pricing data, and incorporating more complex logic into their strategies.
How do you know which repricer is providing the best mix of these characteristics? Keep reading to see our definitive Walmart repricer comparison.
What is a Walmart repricer?
Just like their more well-known Amazon counterparts, Walmart repricers are tools that update the price of your marketplace listings automatically on your behalf. They will typically follow a set of basic rules for how to make price changes, which frees up more of your time to source products and manage other aspects of your business. Plus with all of the market fluctuation, this becomes a pretty tedious task once you have more than your first couple of listings, and even then you'll have to sleep at some point!
A pricing tool will connect with your Walmart selling account and watch how the prices of your products change over time. As the price of the Buy Box changes, your repricer considers how to update your price in order to make your listing more competitive. If it determines that your price needs to be updated, it immediately calculates and submits that price change to Walmart.
While there isn’t much data on the Walmart side of things yet, Amazon reports that 82% of organic sales come from the Buy Box. Therefore, it’s a huge deal to keep your prices competitive and improve the likelihood of winning that coveted distinction. None of this is a well-kept secret, which means other sellers are trying to do it too. So in order to keep up and make your price changes fast enough, you need the technology of a repricer.
How do I use a Walmart repricing tool?
Repricers use strategies that you can customize to fit your business goals. They can offset your price above or below the Buy Box price by a specific dollar amount or percentage, or they can match the Buy Box price exactly.
Good repricers will also protect you from being removed from the listing for a "reasonable price not satisfied" error from Walmart by allowing you to set a max price in relation to your cost. And they should always make sure you never sell for a loss by allowing you to set a min price, even if your buy box offset would technically bring you below it.
For example, if the buy box price is $20.00, your minimum price is $17.00, and your repricing strategy is to beat the buy box price by $4.50, then technically your offset strategy should reprice you to $15.50, but respecting the minimum price means you’d only get repriced down to $17.00.
Look for repricers that will never overstep your minimum or maximum thresholds.
Many repricers also allow you to view detailed information for each of your listings, such as:
Min/Max price
Current price
Competition price
Number of competitors
Number of offers on the listing
Estimated profit (at your current selling price)
What does it take to be considered the best Walmart repricer?
Here are the characteristics that our e-commerce experts use to evaluate repricing software:
Flexibility
Basic repricing tools won’t cut it anymore. Simple reactivity isn’t what you should be looking for. Flexibility is a major aspect of what makes a repricer the best. That means a Walmart repricer tool that is able to take a handful of settings and handle a multitude of situations that it may have to deal with. In other words, advanced strategies.
Other tools are simply blind to the situations that don’t fit into their settings.
Speed
When it comes to controlling the Buy Box and increasing your revenue, your Walmart repricing software needs to be quick to react to a price change as soon as they happen. The best Walmart repricer can quickly calculate what changes need to be made and push them as close to real time as possible.
A difference to look out for is a repricer that changes your prices based on a set time. As an example, some cheaper repricing tools will only reprice your products every 15 minutes or every hour. What you want is a repricer that updates your prices instantly.
As an example, flashpricer has instant repricing, which means a higher amount of price changes keeping you in the Buy Box versus your competition using another tool.
This all comes down to how optimized the platform and strategy is. You could have an amazing strategy but if the platform is slow and sluggish, it won’t help you in winning the Buy Box.
When you pair sound repricing strategies with technology fast enough to execute them, you are well on your way to increasing your profits.
Reliability and Accuracy
Does your repricer really known the competitor's price?
The repricer you’re using relies on Walmart’s API to receive updated prices, as well as important information about the buy box owner — such as their name, current price, and seller metrics.
The problem is that the data being shared by the Walmart API is wrong. A lot.
In fact, after a multi-month investigation into the data that is provided by the API, over 40% of the buy box data received is out-of-date, missing, or downright incorrect. Because of this, the competition price reported by other repricers like Seller Active, Informed.co, Monster Seller, and Geek Seller does not match the information shown on Walmart.com’s website.
How can you be expected to reprice your listings effectively if the automated strategies you’re using are reacting to old or inaccurate competitor pricing?
You need a software that has other ways of obtaining the actual prices and buy box information displayed on the front-end of Walmart Marketplace. For example, flashpricer uses proprietary AI algorithms to collect the price and offer that the actual buyer is seeing when they are shopping on Walmart.com. And the results are AMAZING!
Cost
Cost does matter. Not in the way you would think though. You see, it's less about the cheapest options when it comes to a Walmart repricer and more about the best ROI you receive for your monthly subscription.
Some repricer tools are incredibly cheap but lack both features and performance. Where you're "getting a good deal" you're actually losing A LOT of revenue. The more revenue, the more profit if all else is constant.
Our recommendation is to find a healthy balance between cost and value. I want to know that the repricing tool I choose has a very large return on investment for my business and keeps my profit margin as high as possible. Tools that take a percentage of your sales cut into your ROI significantly and should be avoided.
An Effective Free Trial
A free trial may not seem that critical, but it certainly is. Oftentimes a credit card is required at the time of signing up to start a free trial with a repricing software.
Like most people, we tend to simply log out of a tool to never return if it's not what we like. If the free trial requires you to enter a credit card during the account creation phase, you'll certainly be charged. Software companies know that people are this way and try to extract a bit more money from you.
What you should look for is what's known as an un-gated free trial — where you can create an account and fully use the software before having to add a payment method like a credit card. In all honesty, this should be the golden standard for any Walmart repricing software.
The repricing tools for Walmart Marketplace sellers worth considering
Here is how the different Walmart Marketplace repricers on the market stack up to one another:
Flashpricer Walmart Repricer
Flashpricer’s difference is their ability to view real-time pricing information from the front-end of Walmart.com. That way, if the API is not providing the correct data, there is still a way to achieve accuracy.
Flashpricer is made by the a team that has over 15 years of repricing experience. Over the last year or so, they developed some highly-effective technical solutions for monitoring Walmart Marketplace and getting around many obstacles such as bot detection, traditional Captchas, press and hold Captchas, and more in order to collect data quickly and accurately off of Walmart.com.
Their repricer puts these skills to use, blending proprietary AI algorithms with the data available from the Walmart API, to power repricing strategies with the insight needed to price our customers into the buy box more competitively.
Seller Active Walmart Repricer
Seller Active doesn't offer any of the algorithms used by flashpricer. Like many basic repricers, it relies solely on the Walmart.com API and will often reprice you against incorrect competitor and buy box data. You also cannot manage your inventory and orders in the same easy-to-use app.
Informed.co Walmart Repricer
Informed.co also doesn't offer any of the algorithms used by flashpricer. Like those other basic repricers, it relies solely on the Walmart.com API and will often reprice you against incorrect competitor and buy box data. You also cannot manage your inventory and orders in the same easy-to-use app.
Monster Seller Walmart Repricer
Like Seller Active, Monster Seller is a basic repricer that doesn't offer any of the algorithms used by flashpricer. Since it relies solely on the Walmart.com API, it will often use incorrect buy box data to make its pricing decisions. They have some inventory and listing management tools as well and repricing is not the main focus.
Geek Seller Walmart Repricer
There are a lot of similarities with Geek Seller to the other competitors. Mainly, that it doesn't offer any of the algorithms used by flashpricer. It again is relying solely on the Walmart.com API, and using potentially outdated pricing information to make its decisions. They offer limited order, inventory, and product management features as well.
Other Well-Known Repricers Not Supporting Walmart
As of early 2022, there are plenty of traditional repricers that don't even support Walmart at all yet. Some of those include:
Perhaps they haven't found a good solution to the Walmart.com API issues that seem to be giving everyone else besides flashpricer some trouble.
The bottom line
There's no doubt that, if accurate, timely results are your top priority. So then you need to be using flashpricer. You can make sure you're the first to try it by signing up to be notified when we launch. The Flashpricer Walmart repricer is coming soon for maximum accuracy and profits. Stay tuned!
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