Introduction
Which product do you need?
The PIM keeps track of what you sell and the Repricer decides what you charge for it, and you can pay for one of them without the other.
Ready for Commerce currently contains two products, and they solve different problems.
The PIM is a catalog. You describe everything you sell once, in one place, and every store, marketplace, counter or feed you sell through is published from that one description. It answers the problem of the same product being written down in several places and drifting apart.
The Repricer sets your selling prices. It works on one listing at a time, and a listing is one product offered in one place at one price. It watches what that listing is competing with, then moves the price for you, between a lowest price and a highest price you set. The problem it answers is changing prices yourself and finding out too late.
You buy them separately, so you can run one, the other, or both. Most people need one well before they need the other, and adding the second later leaves the first exactly as it was.
The short answer
That is the decision. Find the row that sounds most like your week, and the product beside it is where to start. Whichever one you picked, the first move is the same, and it is in create your account.
Everything below explains why each row points where it does, what each product will not do for you, and what changes when you run both. You do not need any of it to get started.
What the PIM solves
Every place you sell keeps its own copy of your product information. Every one of them wants it in a different shape: different field names, different length limits, different image rules. Changing a product means changing it in each place separately. Miss one and that place goes on showing the old version until someone notices.
What that looks like:
- A price or a description is corrected in one admin panel and stays wrong in the others.
- A supplier sends a spreadsheet of new items whose columns do not match your fields, and someone remaps them every time.
- You start selling somewhere new and find your titles are too long for it, your images are the wrong shape, and specifications it asks for are missing.
- Two people edit the same product in two systems, and the later save overwrites the earlier one with no warning.
- No one can say which copy of a product is the correct one.
The PIM removes the copies. There is one catalog, you edit it once, and every place you sell is published from it. Each of them still gets the shape it asks for, and the content behind those shapes stops drifting apart.
What one catalog changes
The PIM does not give you a better copy of your product data. It gives you one copy, and turns everywhere else into an output of it.
Your catalog goes out to several kinds of place, and the PIM groups them on screen the same way. Open the Integrations page from the left sidebar of the PIM and each kind has a heading of its own.
A fifth heading, Tools, comes under those four, and nothing under it is a place to sell. It is where the two products are connected, which is further down this page.
How much of your catalog each one accepts is decided by the integration, not by you, and PIM integrations has that comparison in full.
What you can do before you connect anything
You do not need a connected store to get value out of the PIM. An import loads a spreadsheet into the catalog and maps your columns to catalog fields. An export turns any slice of the catalog back into a spreadsheet. A data source fetches a supplier feed on a schedule you set and keeps the catalog up with it, unattended.
That is the part of the PIM you can use on your first afternoon. Publishing is what you turn on once the catalog is worth publishing.
What the Repricer solves
Prices in a marketplace move all day, including while no one at your end is watching. Setting them yourself fails in two directions. React late and the sale goes to someone else. React too far and you keep the sale and lose the margin on it.
Automated pricing has one well-known way of going wrong, and it takes no mistake from anyone. A competitor’s tool lowers their price. Yours lowers to stay under it. Theirs lowers again. With no limit underneath, both prices keep falling until they are below what the item costs each seller.
How that shows up:
- A competitor changes price and you find out days later.
- You match a lower price without checking whether it is above your own cost.
- You set a lowest price from memory, and it comes out below what the sale costs you once the place you sold it takes its fee.
- You get the sales and lose money on them, and the loss only appears when you total up the month.
The Repricer replaces the reacting with a rule. You give a listing your cost and a strategy, and that strategy moves the price for you whenever the market moves, between the lowest and highest prices you set.
Why every strategy needs a lowest price
The lowest price you set is what stops a price war from taking your price below your cost, and the Repricer is built around it. Build a strategy from Strategies in the Repricer’s left sidebar, and the wizard gives the lowest price a step of its own, named Price Floor. Any strategy that prices against a competitor gets that step, and the wizard will not let you past it until you fill it in. The only strategy that skips the step is one that prices directly from your own cost.
The protection goes further than the wizard. A listing whose lowest price comes from cost, and that has no cost on it, keeps the price it has. The Repricer does not move a price without knowing what you paid.
What the Repricer needs before it can price anything
The Repricer never creates a listing. Listings arrive from the place you sell, so an item you have not listed anywhere is invisible to it. Its file imports update the listings you already have instead of adding new ones.
That is the practical difference between the two products on day one. You can build a whole catalog in the PIM from a spreadsheet, with nothing connected at all. The Repricer has nothing to work on until something of yours is live somewhere.
Where each product connects
The two products do not connect to the same places, and checking that is the fastest way to rule one out. If the place you sell has a Yes against only one of the two products below, your decision is already made.
Each row above is a channel, and the authorized connection between one product and one channel is an integration. Those two words run through the rest of this documentation, and core concepts has the rest of the vocabulary.
You authorize an integration inside the product that will use it. The two are separate applications with separate credentials, so one Amazon seller account run through both is authorized twice, once in each. Doing that for the first time is covered in connect a store.
What the Repricer can see in each place
Two things vary from one place to another, and both of them affect how well your prices behave there. The first is whether the competition is reported to the Repricer or gathered from pages you supply. The second is whether the Repricer can estimate what that place takes out of the sale.
Read the middle column as the difference between a price that reacts on its own and a price that reacts to pages you chose. Read the last one as the difference between a lowest price that has already subtracted the selling fee and one that has not.
Where a selling fee cannot be estimated, your lowest price is calculated with fees at zero, and nothing on screen says so. That number is below the price you can actually afford to sell at.
Where a competitor price comes from
Some places send the competition to the Repricer. The place sends every competing offer on your item, including the one that is getting the sale, and you add nothing.
Everywhere else, you point at the pages yourself. You add competitor page addresses to the listing, and the Repricer reads the price off each one.
Which of the two you get is in the middle column of the table above, and it does not follow from whether the place is a marketplace: eBay is a marketplace where you add the pages yourself. Neither way goes looking for competitors on your behalf, so a listing you have added no competitor address to has nothing to price against. It falls back to the answer you gave the strategy for exactly that case.
What neither product does
Neither one runs your orders
Neither product takes an order, prints a shipping label, handles a return, or does your bookkeeping. If that is where your day actually goes, neither one is the tool you are looking for.
The PIM does read the result of a sale. A sale never reduces a number inside the PIM directly: the place you sold it reduces its own count, and the PIM reads the new number back from there. Where each of your stock numbers comes from is set out in inventory.
Your cost is the number everything else is built on
Open a listing from Listings in the Repricer’s left sidebar, go to its Pricing tab, and you get one box called Unit Cost. It takes one number. There is no freight field, no duty field, and no prep, storage, handling, returns or tax field anywhere in the product. None of those get into your lowest price unless you have already added them into that one number yourself.
The Repricer does check that number against the others on the same listing. It tells you when your cost is above your MAP or your MSRP, and it marks a price that has fallen below your cost. What it cannot do is know whether the number is complete. If your cost is only what you paid your supplier, every price built on top of it is missing everything else you spent.
Nothing here plugs into your own systems
There is no public API and no webhooks, in either product. Data moves in and out through imports and exports, which both products have, and through the connections you authorize. If your plan depends on a system of yours calling one of these two, there is nothing for it to call.
Why the PIM cannot fix your Amazon product content
On Amazon the title, the images, the bullet points and the specifications are on a catalog entry shared by everyone selling that same item. It was never yours to write, so the PIM never writes it, in either direction.
What the PIM does manage on Amazon is your offer against that entry. That covers the condition, the price, and the quantity on listings you ship yourself. It also covers the link between your SKU and the ASIN, made on the first push. If your Amazon product content is wrong, correcting it is work you do in Seller Central.
What the PIM does with a price, since it is not a repricer
The PIM never reacts to another seller, and that is the line between the two products. It does still decide the price it publishes, out of your own fields and no one else’s.
Each connected account in the PIM has its own Price source priority, Price adjustment and Rounding settings, plus a MAP floor. Those are applied in that order to build the price that goes out to that account, and every one of them is described in integration settings.
Using both together
The PIM owns what a product is. The Repricer owns what it sells for. Neither one needs the other, and connecting them is a switch you can leave alone for as long as you like.
Which one to set up first
Starting both at once is fine. If you are going to run both, set up the PIM first, and the reason is your cost.
Every lowest price the Repricer calculates comes from the cost on the listing. Once the two products are connected, that cost comes from your PIM instead. Doing it in the other order means typing costs into the Repricer that the PIM later takes over, and living with wrong lowest prices until it does.
What crosses when you connect them
The link is one switch inside the PIM. Click Integrations in the left sidebar, scroll to the bottom of the card grid, and click the card named Repricer, in the section headed Tools.
Turning it on splits the money between the two products. Your cost, your MAP and your MSRP go from a PIM variant to any Repricer listing with the same SKU, and stop being editable on the Repricer side. Going the other way, the Repricer takes over the selling price on every account you connected in both products, and the PIM stops publishing a price to those accounts. Which of your accounts can pair, and how to get the prices back, are both in the Repricer connection.
Nothing about this decision is permanent. Adding the second product later leaves the first untouched: the same account, the same organization, the same team, and one bill with a line on it for each.
When neither one is the answer yet
Three situations where you do not have the problem these products solve.
Finding out costs you nothing either way. Each product starts on a free trial and has a free tier under it, and both price tables are laid out in plans and billing.