Insights

The Insights tab on a listing shows your profit and margin, your price limits, where your price is against the market, and how the item has been selling.

Every listing in the Repricer has a tab that does nothing but show you numbers. It answers three questions about that one item: whether you are making money, where your price is against the rest of the market, and whether the item is selling.

You cannot change anything on it. Your listings table gives you one of these answers per column, and you have to hold several columns in your head at once to get the picture. This tab puts the whole picture for one item in one place, and it shows you the sum behind each number instead of only the answer. Most people open it for one of three reasons: a profit figure that looks wrong, a price not winning the Buy Box, or an item that has stopped selling.

Click Listings in the sidebar down the left, then click a row. The listing opens in a dialog, and Insights is the third tab across the top of it. What you get is four cards of headline numbers, and under them a grid of larger cards, each one a box with its own title.

Before you start

What your role lets you do

Every role can open the Insights tab and read every number on it, Analyst included. There is nothing on the tab you can change, so no role unlocks anything here. Roles are set in team, roles and permissions.

Three of the four cards need a cost first

Profit, Margin and ROI are all worked out from what the item costs you. On a listing with no cost, all three read as a dash, and the Product cost line on the Margin Analysis card is empty too.

Type the cost into Unit Cost on the Pricing tab, one tab to the left, and the three cards fill in. See cost, fees and profit for where a cost comes from and what else it changes.

How to read a listing’s insights

1. 1

   Open the listings table

   Click Listings in the sidebar down the left.

2. 2

   Open the listing

   Click any cell in the row except Strategy, Cost, Manual Price, Min, Max, MAP or MSRP. Those seven columns open an edit inside the table instead, and every other cell opens the listing in a dialog over the rows.

3. 3

   Go to the Insights tab

   The tabs run across the top of that dialog. Click Insights, the third one.

4. 4

   Read the four cards first

   Profit, Margin, ROI and Fees run along the top of the tab. Hover any one of them and you get the sum behind it.

5. 5

   Open the card that answers your question

   Under those four are up to six larger cards, each with its own title. Go to the one named for what you came to find out.

That is the whole tab. Everything on it is read-only, so there is nothing to save and nothing to undo. What you do about a number happens on the Pricing tab or in your strategy.

Everything below goes through the four cards at the top and then each larger card in turn. You do not need any of it to read a number off the tab.

Every card in detail

The Insights tab is the same on every integration. Four cards run across the top, and under them the larger cards come in this order: Sales, Market Position, Price Activity, Margin Analysis and Price Guardrails. A sixth, B2B Market, is only on a listing that has business market data on it.

Two of the larger cards, Sales and Price Activity, cover a period you choose. The four at the top and the other four larger cards show what is true right now.

The four cards across the top

Four large numbers run across the top of the Insights tab, above every card. They are the headline answer to whether this listing is worth selling, and each one is about a single sale at today’s price.

Profit and Margin are green when you are making money on the listing and red when you are losing money on it, and the strip behind all four takes a faint tint of the same color. Fees is amber whatever the number is, because a fee is money leaving you either way.

Hover a card and you get the sum behind it. Each of the four opens a breakdown: Profit breakdown, Margin breakdown, ROI breakdown and Fee breakdown. Each one lists the numbers that went in, then the answer, then the formula in plain arithmetic.

The price in all four is what the item is selling for on the channel right now, and the cost is whatever you have in Unit Cost on the Pricing tab. Type a different cost there, come back to Insights, and the cards have already moved, saved or not.

On a store of your own and on Square there is no fee estimate, so Fees reads as zero and Profit is your price minus your cost.

How the item has been selling

Sales is the first card under the four at the top of the Insights tab, at the left. It is the only place on a listing that tells you whether the item is actually moving.

Under the rows is a bar chart, one bar per day. Hover a bar and you get that day’s date, its units and its revenue. A day’s unit count on its own does not say whether those units went out at one price or several. The chart needs at least 2 days to draw, so Today and Yesterday give you the rows and no chart.

The period is a dropdown at the top right of the card, reading Last 30 days when you arrive. Open it and you get Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Last 14 days and Last 30 days. Changing it changes Units sold, Revenue and the chart, and leaves Last sale alone. On a listing with nothing sold in the last 30 days the dropdown is not there at all, because no period you could pick would show you anything.

Revenue counts one currency at a time. An account selling into two currencies has days whose money is in the other one. Those sales are counted in Units sold and left out of Revenue. A small amber triangle appears beside the number when that has happened, and hovering it says so.

Where you are against the market

Market Position is the second card on the Insights tab, in the middle of the top row of cards. It is your price against everybody else’s, on the product this listing is.

What each of the three statuses means is on listing and repricing status. The Competitors tab, two tabs to the right of Insights, is where you find out who those competitors are.

The gap is the small colored number to the left of a price. You get one beside Buy Box price and one beside Lowest competitor. It is how far your own price is from that one, in money and as a percentage. Red means you are the pricier of the two, green means you are cheaper, and gray means the two are the same. Hover a gap and you get Your price, the price you are being compared against, Gap, and the formula, which reads Gap = Your price − Buy Box price.

One amber line can appear under the four rows, and it reads You have the lowest price but aren't winning the Buy Box. You get it when three things are true at once. You are not winning, nothing has said your offer cannot compete for the Buy Box, and your price is at or below the lowest competitor. It is worth reading as a signal to stop cutting the price, because something other than price is deciding this one.

What the price has been doing

Price Activity is the third card on the Insights tab, at the right of the top row of cards. It is a summary of what repricing has done to this listing, and the Activity tab in the same dialog is the full list.

Last change ignores the period. It is the most recent change ever recorded on this listing, so it has a date on it even when Changes reads a small number.

Under the rows is a line chart with one point per day, holding the last price forward across days when nothing changed. A flat stretch means the price held, and the line rescales when you change the period, so 7 days really does look like 7 days.

The period dropdown is at the top right of this card too, with the same five choices as Sales and the same Last 30 days to start. It is missing on a listing whose price has not changed in the last 30 days.

Only the prices your ordinary shoppers see are counted here. A change to your business price never appears on this card, and the Activity tab has both kinds together.

Where the money goes on one sale

Margin Analysis is the fourth card on the Insights tab, first in the second row of cards. It takes one sale apart a line at a time, from the selling price down through the channel’s fee and your cost to what is left. Each deduction is also given as a percentage of your price.

Open it when a card gives you a number you did not expect, because it shows you which line is taking the money. See cost, fees and profit for the card row by row, and for what a fee estimate leaves out.

The limits your strategy has to work inside

Price Guardrails is the fifth card on the Insights tab, in the middle of the second row. It is the numbers you set on the Pricing tab, read back to you next to what the item is selling for now.

The color of a number is the answer you came for. Red means your price today breaks that limit, either under Minimum or MAP or over Maximum or MSRP. Amber means your price is exactly on it. Anything else is plain. Req. profit goes green when the Profit card meets it and red when it does not.

A limit you have not filled in reads Not set. That is not an error on most of your listings, because a maximum, a MAP and an MSRP are all optional.

Minimum sometimes has a small Auto label beside it. That means your strategy calculates the floor from your cost instead of taking a number from you, and hovering Auto gives you the whole calculation. See pricing on a listing for which strategies do that and how to type your own minimum again.

Reading a red row here is not the same as fixing one. Every number on this card is set somewhere else, on the Pricing tab or in the strategy.

The market for business buyers

B2B Market is the sixth card on the Insights tab, and it is the one that is not always there. You get it on a listing that has business market data on it, which in practice means an account selling to business buyers.

The gaps on this card are against your business price and not your ordinary one. Your business price is not a row here, because it is already in the header at the top of the dialog, as Current B2B.

B2B minimum is only there when your strategy prices business orders against the market. A strategy that gives business buyers a fixed price, or a set percentage off your ordinary price, has no separate business floor to show. See business pricing for all three ways a strategy can price a business order.

Limits

What the Insights tab cannot do

How current these numbers are

Two of the cards fill in once and the rest are always live, and knowing which is which explains a number that will not move while you watch it.

Sales and Price Activity fill in when you open the Insights tab and not again. Changing the period brings in nothing new, because both cards already have the whole 30 days and cut your period out of it. To see newer numbers, click another tab and click Insights a second time.

Market Position, B2B Market, Price Guardrails and the four cards at the top come from the same numbers as your listings table, so they change while you are looking at them as new readings come in. How often market data is collected is on competitors.

A day here is a day in UTC, not a day on your own clock. Today is the current UTC day and Yesterday is the one before it. Last 7 days is the last 7 of them, counting today. So an evening sale in Los Angeles is counted into the following day, and Today can read zero on an afternoon when you know something sold.

When something goes wrong

A card with nothing in it

Three of the cards can come up empty, and each one tells you which kind of empty it is. Read the title, because the three kinds mean different things and only one of them is worth acting on.

The two ending in in this period are the ones you can act on. Pick a longer period from the dropdown at the top right of that card and the numbers come back.

No market data yet tells you why underneath, and it gives one of three reasons. The listing is Inactive on the channel, and nothing is collected for an inactive listing until you put it back on sale. Or the listing is on a store of your own, where the competing prices come from addresses you supply, so the answer is to add one on the Competitors tab. Or the first reading is simply not in yet, which normally takes minutes.

A number that does not match your listings table

Fees is the one that surprises people here. The card adds up the referral fee and the fulfillment fee, which is what the formula under it says it does. The Fees column in your listings table adds up the whole estimate. On some channels that has a fixed charge per order in it as well, so the card reads a few cents better than the column on the same listing.

The column is the number your strategy prices against. Cost, fees and profit has the difference in full.

Where to go next