Introduction
What is Ready for Commerce?
Ready for Commerce is an ecosystem for the commercial side of a business that shares one sign-in and one setup across the two products it has.
Ready for Commerce is an ecosystem for the commercial side of a business: what you sell, how you describe it, what it costs you, and what it sells for. Said plainly, it is a set of software that shares one sign-in and one setup. It currently has two products, the PIM and the Repricer, and one shared foundation they both run on.
The problem it exists for is repetition. If you sell the same items in more than one place, you type the same product into every one of them. Then next week you change the price in every one of them again. The PIM gives you one description of a product that every place you sell reads from. The Repricer gives you one set of rules that decides what that product sells for.
You do not have to take both. Each one works on its own, and you turn on the one you want from your account. Everything below explains what each product is for, what you set up once for both of them, and how they behave together.
What you set up once for both
The two products share a foundation, and it is the reason you never set the same thing up twice. That foundation has four things in it: who you are, which organization you are working in, who else works in it, and what you pay. Both products read all four from it.
An organization is your business. It is the word the app uses everywhere, so it is worth learning here rather than meeting it cold later.
In practice the shared foundation means you sign in once, name your organization once, and invite your teammates once. Opening the other product after that asks you for none of it again.
Three addresses make up the ecosystem, and one sign-in covers all three.
Your language and the organization you are working in come with you. Moving from one product to the other never asks you to sign in again, or to pick the organization again.
There are no passwords here. You sign in with a single-use code emailed to you, or with Google. Signing in and security has the whole picture.
Turning a product on
Neither product is on when you arrive. Signing in for the first time puts you on your account home page, and it shows one card per product. On a product you do not have yet, that card has a button reading Start free trial. Clicking it turns that product on and opens it.
The trial runs 30 days, it is per product, and it does not ask for a payment method. Turning on the second product later starts a second trial on its own clock. What happens when one ends is in plans and billing.
If a card says Ask an admin to activate instead, someone else has to turn that product on, because only an owner or an admin of your organization can.
Who owns what
Almost nothing of value is yours personally. The organization owns it, and everyone you invite works on the same catalog, the same connections and the same listings. There are no per-person copies of anything.
That matters most on the day a teammate joins your team. Accepting the invitation they were emailed puts them into your organization. Signing up on their own instead does not fail. It does not add them either: it creates a second, empty organization alongside yours, with no warning. Undoing that is covered in organizations.
One sign-in can be in several organizations, with a different role in each. That is how two businesses stay separate under one email address. What each person is allowed to do is decided by two roles that do not affect each other. One is for the organization, and one is inside each product. Every role is listed in team, roles and permissions, and the vocabulary the rest of this documentation uses is in core concepts.
What the PIM does
The PIM is where your products are kept. You write down everything you sell once, in one place, and the PIM sends it out to every place you have connected. What a shopper sees anywhere else is downstream of what is here, so correcting a title here corrects it everywhere.
Say that another way. Nothing you type into the PIM is for the PIM’s benefit. It is the master copy, and every other copy is made from it.
A catalog is built out of five pieces.
- Products. One per thing you sell.
- Variants. The versions of a product that differ by size, color, or any option you name. Once a product has variants, its identifiers, prices, costs, stock and dimensions go on each variant instead of on the product.
- Specifications. The facts you describe things with, such as a material or a wattage. You define one once, in a group, and reuse it from then on.
- Categories, brands and tags. Three separate ways to group the same catalog, and all three can apply to one product at the same time.
- Assets. Your images and documents, kept in one library and attached wherever you need them.
An identifier is a code that names one exact item. A SKU you made up yourself is one, and so is a barcode printed on the box. The whole set is in identifiers.
The PIM also edits your pictures, which surprises people who expect a catalog to be text only. Every image in your asset library has an Optimize action in its menu. It makes a second picture from the one you have: bigger, in a different shape, in another file format, or with the background cut away. Your original is never touched, and the Optimizer is the page for that.
Alongside the catalog there is a set of reports that count what is in it and what is missing from it, and reports works through them.
The three ways information gets into the catalog
Pulling from an integration reads what is already on a store you sell through. It is the fastest way to fill a new catalog, and it is where most people start.
Importing a file loads a spreadsheet you already have. You map your columns to catalog fields, and you see the first rows of your own file while you do it. An import cannot be undone once it runs, so check the mapping before you start it.
A data source is a supplier file the PIM fetches again on a schedule you set, with no one watching. It differs from an import in one way that catches people out. A blank cell makes an import leave your value alone, and makes a data source erase it.
The two ways information gets back out
Publishing to an integration sends your catalog out in the shape that integration accepts.
Exporting a file turns part of your catalog into a CSV or XLSX spreadsheet, built from a filter you set. You can open it, read it, and send it to someone who has no account. It is how you get your catalog to anywhere you have not connected.
What you can set differently for each place you sell
Every connected account has its own publishing settings, so one product can behave differently in two places without you keeping two copies of it.
You choose which of your price fields becomes the published price. You set an adjustment up or down, a rounding rule, a MAP floor, and how much stock to keep back as a buffer. You also set what should happen on that integration when you delete the product here. Each one is described in integration settings.
You can also stop one single product from publishing to one single account. The Sync switch that does it is beside that account’s name in the product editor, and pushing to an integration covers it.
What the Repricer does
The Repricer decides what you charge. It works one listing at a time, and it keeps working without you. A competitor who drops their price at 2 in the morning is answered at 2 in the morning.
A listing is one of your products offered in one place at one price. The same product sold in two places is two listings, and each one is priced on its own.
Every one of your listings needs a strategy, which is the rule that decides how its price reacts. You build one in the Repricer: open Strategies in the sidebar and click Create strategy. A dialog opens over the page and takes you through named steps, and which steps you get depends on where you sell. Basics, Pricing, Safety Nets, Rounding and Preview are always there. Price Floor is added unless you sell on your own store and price from your cost, and an Amazon account with B2B turned on gets a B2B Pricing step as well. Four of these are the parts to know before you start.
- The price floor is the lowest price the Repricer will ever publish. You either type a minimum price on the listing yourself, or you give the Repricer your unit cost and the profit you want to keep. It works the floor out from there.
- The maximum price is the highest, and you set that on the listing too.
- Safety nets cover what the main rule does not: a minimum profit on every sale, respecting MAP and MSRP, and what to do when no one is competing with you.
- Rounding puts your chosen price endings on the result, so a calculated 24.37 can come out as 24.99.
Give the Repricer a cost if you have one, even when you plan to type minimum prices in yourself. A floor calculated from your cost moves when your cost moves. A floor you typed stays where you typed it until you remember to go back. A cost-based floor also adds the marketplace’s own fees on top, where that marketplace reports them, so the number it settles on is a price you make money on.
Competitor prices get to the Repricer two different ways, and which one you get depends on where you sell. Amazon and Walmart report the offers competing for the same item directly, the featured offer that is winning the sale included. Shopify, BigCommerce, eBay and Square report none, because none of them puts rival offers on the same listing the way a shared marketplace catalog does. So you add the address of a competitor’s page to your listing, and the Repricer reads the price off it for you.
How to stop it repricing at night, or at the weekend
A strategy reprices around the clock unless you tell it not to. Inside Safety Nets you can turn a schedule on. Pick the days of the week it is allowed to run, give it a start and an end hour, and name the timezone those hours are in. Outside that window your prices are left alone.
What a record of your price changes gives you
Every price change is kept, with the reason it happened and the price it replaced, and nothing deletes that history as it ages.
A listing that is not repricing tells you so on the listing itself, with the reason it is stuck. That reason is usually a missing cost, a missing minimum price, or a strategy no one assigned.
When MAP or MSRP takes the decision away entirely
Respecting MAP lifts your price to MAP when the rule would have gone under it. Capping at MSRP pulls your price down to MSRP when the rule would have gone over.
There are two stronger settings underneath those. Always pricing at MAP, and always pricing at MSRP, fix your price at that number and skip the strategy completely. MAP is the one used if you turn both on.
Where your products and prices go
You connect each place you sell from inside the product that is going to use it, and each product connects its own set. What a place accepts from you depends on what that place has room for. A store that keeps brands and categories of its own gets yours. One that does not gets only the parts it has room for.
Places you sell come in kinds, and both products group them the same way.
Which of them each product connects to today:
Each product keeps its own credentials, and neither one can use a connection you made in the other. So the same Amazon account run through both is authorized twice, once in each, and your two accounts are paired after that.
One integration behaves unlike the rest, and it matters before you connect it. On Amazon the words and pictures of a listing are on a catalog entry shared by everyone selling that item, so they are not yours to write. What the PIM manages there is your offer against that entry: your condition, your price, your stock and the SKU it is tied to. It never writes listing text in either direction. The PIM’s side of all of this is in integrations.
How the two products work together
The PIM owns what a product is. The Repricer owns what it sells for. Running both without connecting them means two products writing a price to the same store and overwriting each other, which is the problem connecting them solves.
You connect them from the PIM. Open Integrations in the sidebar and go to the section headed Tools, at the bottom of the card grid, where the PIM puts the other Ready for Commerce product. Click the card named Repricer and a dialog opens with a Connect button in it. Clicking that button is the whole job, and it moves your costs one way and your selling prices the other.
Neither product needs the other, and the Repricer connection covers what changes on the day you turn it on.
What the ecosystem does not do
- You never pick a plan. Each product calculates what you pay from how much of it you use, and moves that number up and down on its own. Nothing is locked behind a higher plan, and plans and billing lists the tiers.
- Everything comes to you by email. Neither product has a notification bell, an inbox or a list of past alerts. Every email sent to you is listed in profile and preferences.
- The PIM never reacts to a competitor. It builds the price it publishes out of your own fields. Reacting to someone else’s price is what the Repricer is for.
- There is no public API, there are no webhooks, and there is no audit log. Imports and exports are how data moves in and out.
Where this fits in practice
Five common situations, and what each one uses.