How often to reprice eBay listings: a schedule based on cost changes, sales and risk

How often should you reprice eBay listings?

How often to reprice eBay listings is best answered by what changed, not by the clock. A listing should be repriced whenever its cost changes, straight after it sells, and whenever something else that feeds your formula moves, such as a fee rate or a campaign. Between those events, the right checking interval depends on how often the product's cost usually moves and how thin its margin is. A fast-moving, low-margin product might need checks several times a day; a slow, steady one might need one a day.

Repricing, for this guide, means recalculating a listing's price from its current cost with your formula and sending the new price to eBay if it differs enough to matter.

Why is the trigger more important than the timer?

A fixed timer treats every listing the same. Checking every listing every hour wastes effort on the many that have not changed and can still be too slow for the few that have. Triggers focus effort where something has actually happened.

The sale trigger is the most valuable of these. A listing that just sold is, by definition, attractive at its current price, and the most likely to sell again soon. If its cost rose since the last check, every further sale at the old price loses margin.

How do you tier listings by how often they need checking?

For the time between triggers, group your listings and give each group its own interval. A common structure looks like this.

• Just sold: immediate re-read and reprice, ahead of everything else.
• Fast movers and thin margins: several times a day. These are the products where a small cost rise does the most damage.
• Steady products with healthy margins: once or twice a day.
• Listings that have never sold: at least once a day. They are easy to forget, but they can sell at any moment at a price set from an old reading.
• Out-of-stock listings at zero quantity: on a regular schedule, so you notice when stock returns.

How to decide which tier a product belongs in

Use your own readings. Keep a log of each product's cost over a couple of weeks and count how often it changed. A product whose cost changed on many readings belongs in a faster tier; one that never changed can move to a slower one. Add margin to the decision: a product with a wide margin can tolerate a slower tier, because a small rise between checks will not turn its sales into losses. Review the tiers monthly, because products move between them as competition changes.

Which price changes are worth sending to eBay?

Not every recalculated price needs to go to eBay. A change of a penny or two costs an API call and earns almost nothing. Set a threshold and push only changes above it.

• Use a money threshold for cheap items, such as ignoring changes of a few pence.
• Use a percentage threshold for dear items, where a few pence is meaningless but a small percentage is real money.
• Always push changes that cross your floor. If the new cost means the current price is below break-even plus your minimum profit, the change goes out whatever its size.
• Compare in whole pence. Rounding differences between systems can make two equal prices look different by a fraction of a penny. Compare rounded values so you do not push changes that are not changes.

A hypothetical example

Example: suppose you have 2,000 listings, and on a typical day 400 of them see a cost change on at least one reading. Of those, 150 changes move the price by less than 5p. If you push every change, you send 400 updates. With a 5p threshold you send 250, and you lose almost nothing: the 150 skipped changes are worth a few pence each at most. On a day with a sale event, the count of real changes may be far higher, and the threshold helps keep your updates within eBay's limits for the changes that matter.

Do eBay's API limits affect how often you can reprice?

Price changes made by software go to eBay through its APIs, and those APIs have call limits. For a small shop, the limits rarely matter. For catalogues in the thousands or tens of thousands, they shape how you reprice.

1. Batch updates. Send several price changes in one call where the API allows it, rather than one call per listing.
2. Prioritise. Sales, floor breaches and stock changes go first; small adjustments wait.
3. Skip non-changes. The threshold above saves calls every day.
4. Spread work across the day. A steady flow is easier to keep within limits than bursts.

eBay's developer documentation sets out the current limits and how they apply. Your repricing tool should manage them for you and tell you when it is holding changes back.

Is repricing more often always better?

Only if the readings are right. Repricing every hour from bad data just spreads bad prices faster. Frequency is valuable when three things are in place.

• Accurate readings: the right offer, currency, address and condition, including any delivery charge.
• Guards: a floor, a ceiling and a swing limit, so an odd reading is held rather than pushed.
• A record: a reason logged for each change and each hold, so you can see what happened when a sale looks wrong.

Dropizon works this way: after an eBay sale the listing is re-read and repriced first, before any other work, and every push passes a currency guard and a price circuit breaker with a reason recorded for every push and every hold. The eBay repricer page explains the order of work, and the guide to how often Amazon prices change shows how to measure the pace of change behind your tiers.

If you source from Amazon, the schedule is about accurate prices, not about permission. eBay allows dropshipping from a wholesale supplier, but listing an item and then buying it from another retailer or marketplace that ships directly to your buyer is not allowed under eBay's drop shipping policy. You stay responsible for delivery and your buyer's satisfaction.

What does a repricing routine look like for a small shop?

Tiers and thresholds sound like tools for large catalogues, but the same ideas work by hand for a shop with a few dozen listings.

1. Morning: check every listing that sold since yesterday, plus your fast movers. Update any whose cost has moved.
2. Midday: check the fast movers again, and anything that sold during the morning.
3. Evening: one more pass over fast movers and new sales, then a quick look at the never-sold listings.
4. Weekly: review every listing's margin against its current cost, and move products between tiers if their behaviour has changed.

Keep a simple sheet with the listing, its cost at each check and the price you set. After a month you will know which products deserve the extra checks and which barely move. That sheet is also the point at which most sellers realise that checking by hand does not scale: once the list passes a few dozen products, the checks start to slip, and the listings that slip are usually the ones that just sold.

When that happens, automate the triggers first. Automatic re-reading after each sale and automatic stock zeroing remove the two most expensive gaps, even if you still review margins yourself each week.

A repricing schedule checklist

• Reprice immediately after every sale.
• Reprice whenever a cost, fee, campaign or formula changes.
• Tier listings by how often their costs move and how thin their margins are.
• Check never-sold and zero-quantity listings at least daily.
• Push only changes above your threshold, but always push floor breaches.
• Compare prices in whole pence to avoid false changes.
• Review your tiers and thresholds every month.