How automated repricing and floor prices work

A repricing rule tells MarketPulse how to compute a suggested price for one product, one product variant, or every product in a category, based on the competitor prices you’re already tracking. Nothing is pushed anywhere without your say-so unless you’ve connected a store — the engine computes and logs a proposed price on every evaluation regardless, so you always have a record of what it would have done.

The six strategies

Every rule picks one strategy. Three are match strategies — set your price exactly equal to a statistic across your active, tracked competitors: match the lowest, match the average, or match the highest. The other three are beat strategies — offset from that same statistic by an amount you set: beat the lowest, beat the average, or beat the highest. The offset can be a fixed currency amount (“undercut the cheapest competitor by ৳5”) or a percentage of the reference statistic (“price 10% below the average competitor”).

The floor price is never optional

Every rule requires a floor price — the one number the engine will never propose going below, no matter how far competitors race to the bottom. This is deliberate: letting an automated system change a live price with no floor at all is the single easiest way for a repricing feature to cause real financial harm. You can optionally set a ceiling too, so the engine never proposes a price above it either.

Two more layers of protection

Beyond the flat floor price, you can set a minimum margin percentage relative to a product’s own cost price — e.g. “never propose a price less than 20% above cost.” Unlike the fixed floor, this stays correct automatically as your cost changes, without editing the rule. You can also exclude specific competitor links from a rule’s lowest/average/highest calculation — useful when one tracked competitor is, say, a marketplace reseller whose price isn’t a fair signal for your own pricing decision.

Scheduling when a price actually goes live

A rule can be restricted to specific days of the week and a time-of-day window (in UTC), so pricing only updates during, say, business hours — outside the window, the engine still computes and logs what it would have proposed, it just doesn’t apply it. This keeps the audit trail complete even when automation is intentionally paused.

Every evaluation is logged

Whether or not a proposed price actually changes anything, MarketPulse writes a log entry recording the old price, the new price, whether it was applied, and why. If it wasn’t applied — no store connection configured yet, outside the schedule window, or the computed price didn’t actually differ — the log says so, rather than failing silently.

See the Automated Repricing page for the feature overview, or try the numbers yourself with the Margin & Floor Price Calculator.