The PIM connection

Connecting your PIM brings your cost, MAP and MSRP onto every listing with a matching SKU and gives Repricer the price on the accounts you have in both.

The PIM connection links your Repricer to your Ready for Commerce PIM. It is one switch, and turning it on splits the money between the two products. Your PIM owns what each item costs you, and Repricer owns what you charge for it.

That split is the whole feature. Your cost, your MAP and your MSRP come down from a PIM product to every listing with the same SKU. You can no longer type into those three fields here. Going the other way, Repricer keeps the selling price on every seller account you connected in both products, and the PIM stops publishing a price to those accounts.

People turn it on for one of two reasons. Both products were writing a price to the same store and overwriting each other. Or every cost they have was already in the PIM, and their strategies here need a cost to calculate a floor and a margin from.

You will find it under Integrations in the left sidebar. Scroll to the bottom of the card grid, to the section headed Tools, and click the card named PIM. Everything on this page starts in the dialog that opens over the page.

Before you start

What your role lets you do

Integrations is not in your sidebar at all below Admin, so most of your team never opens this dialog. They still run into the connection on the listings they open, because a field the PIM owns is read-only for everyone. Roles are set in team, roles and permissions, and the PIM asks for the same role on its own side.

What has to be true before an account pairs

Both products have to be active on your organization. If yours does not have the PIM, the PIM dialog tells you so and gives you a link to activate it. Its Connect button stays gray until you do.

The same account has to be connected separately in each product. This is the one people get wrong. Connecting Repricer to the PIM connects no store at all. Your Repricer’s Shopify connection and your PIM’s Shopify connection are two separate connections, and the pairing only pairs up accounts you already have on both sides. To get one Shopify store under it you connect it twice, once inside each product, and connect a store covers both.

The account has to be a Shopify store, an Amazon seller account or a Square merchant. Those are the ones that pair. Your accounts on the other integrations go on working exactly as they did.

How to connect the PIM

1. 1

   Open the PIM dialog

   Click Integrations in the left sidebar and scroll to the bottom of the card grid. Click the card named PIM, in the section headed Tools.

2. 2

   Read the four numbers

   The dialog counts your listings, the PIM catalog, and how many of your listings match a SKU the PIM already has. Counting a large catalog takes a moment, and Connect stays gray until it finishes.

3. 3

   Turn the connection on

   Click Connect in the bottom right of the dialog.

4. 4

   Check what paired

   The dialog stays open and switches to a list headed Paired accounts. Each row names one of your accounts, with Prices by Repricer on the right. An empty list means nothing paired, and an account you connected in only one of the two products is usually why.

That is the whole flow. The card gets a green Connected tag, and you get your cost, your MAP and your MSRP on every matching listing within seconds. Your strategies, your price limits and your repricing carry on untouched.

Everything below explains what changed on your listings, where you can see it, and how you give the three fields back. You do not need any of it for the connection to work.

Every option in detail

The PIM dialog is the only screen you get for the connection. Everything else it does turns up on a listing, in the Pricing tab of the dialog that opens when you click a row on Listings. The section after this one covers that.

Read the four numbers before you connect

The PIM dialog, under Integrations, opens on four counts in a two by two grid. They are exact rather than estimates, and you get them fresh every time you open it.

Matched is the number worth reading, because it is how many of your listings the connection will actually touch. It is a real count and not a projection, so it is what you get. A low Matched against a large Repricer listings count means your SKUs do not line up.

A count that could not be calculated shows you a dash. Counting is the slow part of opening this dialog, and it gives up after 1 minute and asks you to try again.

Read the dialog once the connection is on

Open the PIM card under Integrations once more and the dialog looks different. You get two counts instead of four, Matched and Unmatched, above a list headed Paired accounts. Each row gives you your own name for the account, with the integration it is on beside it.

Prices by Repricer on a row is a label, not a switch. Every paired account is priced by Repricer, and there is nothing on the row for you to click. Handing one account back means Disconnect, which hands all of them back.

With nothing paired, you get one line instead of the list, saying no accounts are connected in both products yet. The connection is still on and your costs still come down to matching listings. Pairing decides who owns the selling price, and it decides nothing about your cost.

Connect from the PIM instead

The PIM has the same card under its own Integrations, in its own Tools section, named Repricer. It opens the same dialog with the same four counts, and Connect there does exactly what Connect here does.

You get one connection per organization and neither side is the primary one, so use whichever app you happen to be in. Disconnecting from either side does the same thing too.

Hand the three fields back

Once the connection is on, Disconnect is in the bottom right of the PIM dialog, in red. Clicking it asks you to confirm in a dialog headed Disconnect PIM?.

Nothing is cleared and no price of yours drops to zero. The PIM takes Repricer’s last price for each account and adopts it, which is why the prices on your channels do not move when you disconnect.

From that moment both products publish a price to those accounts again, which is what the connection was stopping. Repricer tells you so with a banner, and the last section on this page covers it.

If that handover fails, the disconnect does not go through. The connection stays on, your prices stay where they are, and the dialog tells you something went wrong. Try it again.

Limits

What the connection cannot do

What the connection changes on your listings

Two things surprise people here. The connection moves far less than you expect, and the one field it matches on is the one field you cannot edit.

How a listing finds its PIM product

A listing is matched to a product in the PIM when the two have the same SKU. That is the only thing compared: not the title, not the barcode, not the ASIN, and not the integration the listing is on.

PIM SKUs are unique inside your organization, so a listing matches at most one PIM product and there is never a tie to break. A listing of yours whose SKU is nowhere in the PIM catalog never matches, and nothing tells you about it beyond the Unmatched count in the dialog.

Matching pays no attention to the integration, and pairing does. Shopify, Amazon and Square accounts are the ones that pair, so those are the accounts whose selling price changes hands. A Walmart, an eBay or a BigCommerce listing of yours still gets its cost, MAP and MSRP from the PIM the moment a SKU matches.

Your listing’s SKU comes in from the account it is on, and you cannot change it here. So the SKU that decides a match is the one on the PIM product. Change it there and the listing stops matching. Its three fields unlock, keeping the values they had, and nothing else about the listing changes.

What you get on a matching listing

Three numbers come down onto the Pricing tab of every matching listing, and they are the three the connection then locks.

Nothing else crosses in this direction. Not a title, a description, an image, a brand, a category, a barcode or a specification. The connection moves money and nothing a shopper reads.

The cost you get is not a field somebody typed. The PIM picks it from the cheapest source that actually has stock, and calls it the Effective Cost. So a stock movement over there can change the cost your strategy prices from, with nobody editing a cost anywhere. Pricing in the PIM covers how it is picked.

A listing priced in a currency your PIM catalog does not use gets converted amounts. Where the PIM has a price in that exact currency on the matching product, you get that price instead of a conversion.

An edit in the PIM shows up here within seconds. There is no button for you to press and no schedule to wait for.

What the connection locks, and what it leaves alone

On a matched listing, Unit Cost, MAP and MSRP stop taking what you type. To see them, click Listings in the left sidebar, click one of your listings, and open the Pricing tab.

Each of the three keeps its value on screen, in a box with a dashed edge, with a small Managed by PIM label beside it. That label is a link, and clicking it opens the matching product in the PIM in a new tab, which is where you change the value.

Everything else on that tab stays yours. Manual Price, Compare Price, Minimum Price, Maximum Price, the strategy and Pause Repricing all work exactly as they did. The connection takes three fields, never the tab.

Those three numbers go on doing what they always did. A floor calculated from cost is calculated from the PIM’s cost, and a strategy holding your price to MAP or capping it at MSRP reads the numbers the PIM sent. See price floor for the first and safety nets for the other two.

Nothing else in Repricer tells you a listing is matched. There is no column in the listings table, no filter and no badge, so the Pricing tab is the only place you can find out.

Four other things in Repricer could write one of those three fields. None of them does while the connection is on.

What your prices do on a paired account

Nothing about your repricing changes. Repricer goes on calculating and goes on submitting your prices, on the same schedule and by the same strategies. A paired account of yours behaves exactly as it did before you connected.

What changed is on the PIM’s side. It stops publishing its own price and compare price to that account, so only one product is writing the price a shopper sees.

Your live price and compare price also go back to the PIM, next to the matching product, for people over there to read. Nobody can edit them there, nothing comes back from that, and somebody who clicks one of those prices opens the listing here on its Pricing tab.

When something goes wrong

The two banners at the top of Repricer

Two warning banners can appear across the top of your Repricer, below any billing banner. Only an Admin sees them, you cannot dismiss either, and each goes away on its own once you have dealt with it.

Both name the accounts they are about. The second one’s button reads View integrations instead, and takes you to the card grid, when your missing accounts are spread over more than one integration.

The first banner is also what you see right after a disconnect. That is correct rather than a fault: you disconnected, and both products are publishing to that account again.

Messages you can run into

Three things that happen with no message

Nothing on screen tells you about any of these.

Connecting rewrites a sync link you already had that copies cost, MAP or MSRP onto a matched listing. Those three fields are taken out of it, and a link that copied nothing else is set to Paused.

Where the PIM has no exchange rate for a listing’s currency, that listing stays matched and stays locked, and its cost, MAP and MSRP stop being updated. It is retried every night, so it fixes itself once the PIM has a rate.

Right after you connect or reconnect, the PIM treats every product on a paired account as handed over, matched or not, until the matching has been worked out. That is deliberate, because the alternative is the PIM writing over your live prices in the gap. It settles on its own.

Where to go next