Amazon price tracking for eBay sellers: what to watch and how often

What does Amazon price tracking for eBay sellers involve?

Amazon price tracking for eBay sellers is the habit, or the software, of reading the current Amazon offer for every product you list on eBay and keeping your eBay price in line with it. A shopper tracks one price and waits for it to fall. A seller tracks hundreds or thousands of prices and reacts to every rise, every fall and every stock change.

The reason is simple. Your eBay price is set from a cost. If that cost moves and your eBay price does not, you either lose margin on every sale or you sit above the market and stop selling.

Tracking also covers stock. A product that goes out of stock on Amazon while your eBay listing still shows quantity available is a sale you may not be able to fulfil on time. That leads to cancellations, late deliveries and unhappy buyers, all of which count against your seller performance. Good tracking treats price and availability as one reading, taken together.

Is sourcing from Amazon for eBay sales allowed?

Before you build any tracking routine, read eBay's rules. eBay allows dropshipping when you fulfil orders directly from a wholesale supplier. Listing an item on eBay and then buying it from another retailer or marketplace that ships directly to your buyer is not allowed under eBay's drop shipping policy. eBay may remove listings, warn, restrict or suspend accounts that break it.

Whatever your sourcing model, you remain responsible for safe delivery within the time stated in your listing and for your buyer's satisfaction. Price tracking helps you keep prices and stock honest. It does not change what eBay permits.

What should an Amazon price tracker record?

The headline price is only one part of your cost. A useful reading captures everything that decides what you would pay and when the item would arrive.

If any one of these is missing, a price change can look correct and still lose money. A cheaper offer with a slow delivery estimate, for example, may cost you a late delivery on eBay.

Why the place and time of a reading matter

Amazon decides which offer wins the buy box for a given delivery address. The same product page can show a different seller, a different delivery charge and a different delivery date at two postcodes. If you buy for buyers all over the country, pick one realistic postcode and read every product there, so your readings are comparable from one day to the next.

Time matters too. A reading from this morning is a fact about this morning. Store the time with every reading, and treat any price older than your check interval as a guess rather than a cost.

How often should you check Amazon prices?

There is no single right interval. A sensible schedule ranks products by how much they move and how much is at stake.

• Listings that just sold: read again straight away. A sale tells you the price was attractive, and the next buyer should get a price based on today's cost.
• Fast movers and thin margins: several times a day. A small rise can wipe out the profit on a low-margin item.
• Steady products with a healthy margin: once or twice a day is usually enough.
• Listings that have never sold: at least daily. They can still sell at any moment at a price set from an old reading.
• Around sale events: more often. Prices drop for the event and rise again when it ends.

Write your intervals down per group and review them each month. If a group keeps showing changes at every check, you are checking too rarely.

How do you turn a reading into an eBay price?

A reading is only useful if it feeds a pricing rule you trust. The usual chain looks like this.

1. Take the item price plus any delivery charge as your cost.
2. Add your markup, either a percentage, a fixed amount, or both.
3. Gross up for eBay fees so the fees come out of the sale price, not out of your margin.
4. Check the result against a minimum profit floor and a ceiling.
5. Compare it with the current eBay price and only push a change that is worth making.

A hypothetical example

Example: suppose an item costs £18.00 on Amazon with free delivery, you want a 15% markup, and you use a hypothetical combined eBay fee of 12% of the sale price for the arithmetic (check your real rate on eBay's selling fees page). Cost plus markup is £20.70. To leave £20.70 after a 12% fee, divide by 0.88, which gives £23.52. If the next reading shows £19.50, the same steps give £25.48. Without tracking, you would keep selling at £23.52 and take home less than you planned on every order.

Which readings should you never push to eBay?

Tracking at scale means some readings will be wrong. A good process spots them before they reach a live listing.

• Wrong currency: a dollar figure read as pounds, or the reverse. Check the currency symbol on every reading.
• Wrong delivery country or postcode: a page shown for an address abroad can show different prices and stock.
• Huge swings: a price that halves or doubles in one reading is often a page error, a multipack or a different variation.
• Pages with no buy box: if there is no clear offer, there is no price to use.
• Captions and unit prices: a number such as a price per 100 g can be read as the item price by a careless reader.

Set a floor, a ceiling and a swing limit, and send anything outside them to a review queue. A day's delay on one listing costs far less than a price that loses money on every sale.

Should you track by hand or with software?

By hand, tracking works for a few dozen listings. You open each product, note the price and stock, and update eBay. Beyond that, the checks fall behind and the gaps start costing you.

Software reads the pages on a schedule and applies your formula. Dropizon, for example, reads the live Amazon buy box in a real browser tab on your own computer, at the delivery postcode you choose, and reprices eBay listings with your own formula through eBay's official APIs, recording a reason for every change and every hold. You can see how that works on the Amazon price tracker for eBay page and in the documentation.

What to look for in a tracking tool

• It reads the same offer a real shopper sees at your chosen postcode, including the delivery charge.
• It records stock status and sets the eBay quantity to zero when the item cannot be bought new.
• It lets you set your own markup, fee allowance and profit floor rather than a fixed rule.
• It explains every change, so you can audit a loss after the event.
• It holds odd readings for your review instead of pushing them live.

Whichever route you take, keep a log. When a sale loses money, the log tells you whether the reading was old, wrong, or simply outrun by a price rise.

A quick tracking checklist

• List every eBay listing with its Amazon product and the postcode you read it at.
• Record price, delivery charge, currency, stock, seller type and delivery estimate on each check.
• Group products by movement and margin, and give each group a check interval.
• Re-read any listing that has just sold before the next buyer arrives.
• Set a profit floor, a ceiling and a swing limit, and review anything held.
• Read eBay's drop shipping policy and make sure your sourcing model meets it.
• Look at your pricing formula once a month against real sales and fees, using the Amazon UK price comparison and history to spot products that move a lot.