The first thing Richard Gastmeier will tell you about running RV Part Shop is that he doesn’t sleep.
I am basically sleepless. I hibernate like a bear: I’m asleep in the winter, but in the summer, we’re just flat out crazy and I don’t sleep.
When you’re running Canada’s largest online retailer for RV parts and accessories, it’s hard to find the time to sleep, let alone find the time to do everything that comes along with running the business: creating marketing materials, testing out new marketplaces, and updating prices on thousands of SKUs to make sure they’re staying competitive with other online sellers.
Richard is now in his sixth year of running his business, and he knew it was time to automate as many aspects of his business as he could so that the business could continue to grow.
The first part of his business that Richard automated was his shipping department. RV Parts used to order items from a supplier to be sent to their warehouse, and then RV Parts would turn around and ship those items out to buyers. After doing this process for a few years, the supplier they were working with came out with a dropshipping program that allowed RV Parts to get rid of their shipping department entirely.
Why have the overhead? The suppliers were prepared to handle the shipping for us, and they do a good job with it. So they handle that, and we handle the marketing and customer service.
Not having to worry about physically shipping items to customers has saved Richard a ton of time, but as his business continued to grow, he found that he needed to automate another part of his business in order to stay on top of everything.
The big challenge has been keeping track of our expanding catalog and all the pricing that goes with it. And that’s where Informed Repricer comes in.
Richard knew how important it was to maintain competitive prices by constantly monitoring competitor prices, but that becomes a bit difficult to do when you have hundreds or thousands of SKUs, let alone 45,000 SKUs like Richard does.
He began researching how other companies with a large amount of products handled their pricing, and he discovered that some online sellers were using automated repricing tools. At first, he was a bit hesitant to try out one of these tools.
I was a little worried at first, because I saw some horror stories about repricers messing with people’s prices and costing them money. Some of the other repricers in the market had this issue, so I did lots of research and read lots of reviews.
After doing his research and confirming that Informed Repricer is safe and secure, he decided to try it out based on all of the positive reviews Informed Repricer had.
Informed Repricer has worked as advertised and I don’t have any problems where I’m seeing stuff selling for less than we should be selling it for.
Soon enough, Richard started applying Informed Repricer’s repricing strategies to tens of thousands of SKUs.
It would be absolutely impossible to sell anything and try to set pricing on all of our items if we didn’t have a repricer. Informed Repricer is necessary.
Richard’s favorite repricing strategy is Informed Repricer’s “Get the Buy Box” algorithm. This intuitive algorithm allows your items to compete exclusively with the current Buy Box offer. In a nutshell, the strategy works by automatically raising and lowering your prices to strategically win you the Buy Box and keep you in the Buy Box for as long as possible.
Most of our products are using the Get the Buy Box repricing strategy, and we set a high and low profit-margin to calculate minimum and maximum prices for each item.
Informed Repricer's repricing strategies make setting minimum and maximum prices for each item simple by allowing customers to establish target profit-margins. Rather than set individual minimum and maximum prices for thousands of SKUs, Richard was able to simply decide on a minimum profit-margin that he’s comfortable making on his sales and then apply that to his repricing strategies. Informed Repricer then automatically calculated minimum prices for each item based on the minimum profit-margin Richard decided on.
Since Informed Repricer automatically accounts for sourcing costs and Amazon fees in minimum price calculations, Richard didn’t have to do any manual work other than deciding on the minimum and maximum profit-margin that made sense for his business.
In addition to the increase in sales and Buy Boxes from using Informed Repricer’s repricing strategies, Richard also learned that Informed Repricer is a great tool for discovering exactly how much profit you’re making. Figuring out the profit you’re making after fees and sourcing costs is a huge struggle for Amazon sellers, so this was a big relief to Richard to now have an easy way to do this.
Informed Repricer gives me a good overview of what kind of profits I’m making. I like that I can look at the dashboard and see how much I sold that month, how much net profit I made that month, what percentage of my products are in the Buy Box... it’s important to have that information at a glance because I can’t easily figure those numbers out from my back office.
Another issue that Informed Repricer solves for Richard is compliance with Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) regulations. MAP is a minimum amount that resellers agree not to advertise below.
I have a number of products that have MAP pricing associated with them, so I have to set a hard bottom limit to them.
Richard is able to use Informed Repricer’s manual minimum price feature to ensure that the price of these items never go below their MAP price. Since Informed Repricer never prices an item below its minimum price, Richard simply sets a manual minimum price for any of his items with MAP pricing, and then he never has to worry about violating any MAP regulations.
When asked what his favorite thing about Informed Repricer is, Richard’s answer was simple:
The fact that I just don’t have to worry about anything. Informed Repricer is keeping me competitive all the time, it’s helped me increase both my sales and profits, it’s taking care of MAP prices, and it saves us time.
With Informed Repricer saving him so much time, Richard is able to spend more time on other key areas of running his business, such as creating marketing materials and providing top-notch customer service.
“It’s all one big pod. If I don’t have to spend time repricing and worrying about MAP pricing, I can be doing an email newsletter. So Informed Repricer also helps increase our profits by allowing us to focus on things like marketing.”
Informed Repricer is a competitive repricing platform that helps online businesses drive profits using smart algorithms and actionable insights.
