Repricing
The merchantCENTRAL hub keeps a central Competitor Prices table: per item, channel, and source the lowest market price and a reference price with timestamp. Marketplace connectors fill it automatically (e.g. Amazon from its offer notifications: the lowest price of the other sellers, the BuyBox price as reference); manual maintenance or your own sources work just as well. The Price Engine turns it into a configurable strategy per price list.
Strategy per price list
You find the fields in the Price Calculation Setup:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Competitor Strategy | Ignore (default) · Match · Undercut · Premium |
| Competitor Offset % / Amount | How far below (undercut) or above (premium) the market price; percent wins over amount |
| Competitor Min. Margin % | The floor of the repricing: this is how far competition may push the margin down, at most |
| Competitor Max Age (Hours) | Stale market prices do not steer (default: 24 h) |
| Competitor Channel Code | If the competitor prices are stored under a different channel code than the price list code |
| Allow Competitor Events | Governance: whether marketplace connectors may additionally intervene through the pipeline events. Off = only the strategy configured here drives the repricing |
The corridor
Every strategy works inside the corridor:
- never below the minimum price and the competitor minimum margin – and the marketplace fees go on that floor like on any price (fee table and the connector's fees). Undercutting down to the floor therefore never means "cost minus commission".
- never above the list price cap
- and behind it the safety limits still check every price
"The repricer priced us into ruin" structurally cannot happen — the price follows the market in both directions, but only within your limits.
Every adjustment carries its source
The calculation log shows every competitor adjustment with amount and source (e.g. AMAZON BuyBox) — repricing without a black box. That is the answer to the customer question "why 94.99 instead of 99.99?".
Where do the competitor prices come from?
| Source | Path |
|---|---|
| Marketplace connectors | e.g. the Amazon connector from its offer notifications (ANY_OFFER_CHANGED, B2B_ANY_OFFER_CHANGED) — automatic, per country and, for business offers, on the business price list |
| Manual maintenance | the hub page Competitor Prices is directly editable |
| Your own sources | price portals or your own research write into the same table via API/import |
When the lowest competitor price changes, the Price Engine queues the item for every price list that follows that channel – it is recalculated with the next queue run, not only with the full run. A source reporting the same price again only refreshes its timestamp. Together with the price-written event after every write, channels react without polling.