Q&A: What's the fastest way to reprice books?

QUESTION: What's the best way to automatically update the prices of my listings? I'm still tweaking mine by hand, but I would like to set up a system where each listing's price is automatically matched with the lowest competing offer of same quality.

Christmas is just around the corner, and it would be great to be competitive. But tweaking 2000 plus listings by hand between now and Thanksgiving? No time for that, I am afraid...

Also, is there any way to exclude certain books from the automated updating, or will I have to update my entire database when I give the command?

ANSWER: Let's begin with Amazon. Of course you know about the Marketplace Open Listings page, where you can view your open listings and adjust prices. This is a pretty good tool for managing prices if your inventory is in the hundreds of books. This is a huge improvement over the days when I started selling six years ago, when you had to click through every Marketplace listing to see any prices.

You can also set your preferences on this page to display the lowest absolute price, or the lowest price for the same condition.

If you need to fully automate your repricing, there's lots of tools for it nowadays. I've listed the ones I'm familiar with here.

One product that's made especially for Amazon users is AMan, which offers a free 21-day trial. It does the kind of tasks you're talking about -- automated repricing with the ability to customize how it handles certain items in your inventory.

AMan was recently upgraded, and I tested and reviewed it for BookThink:

Repricing can mushroom into an unmanageable chore as your business grows larger. When I started selling on Amazon six years ago, there were no automation tools like this, so I had to scroll through Amazon's Web pages to update each of my prices.

AMan and a few of the others do some additional tasks for you, like printing packing slips and automating your postage printing.

The drawback with most of the seller software is you're charged a monthly fee. Several of them also want a cut of your Marketplace sales. There is one repricer I know of without a fee: Tooyen. This one is probably a lot easier to understand if you're already familiar with the basic idea of a spreadsheet because that's how you'll be viewing your listings and your prices in.

So here's the list, and and you know of one not listed, please add a comment below. If you have a favorite, let us know why.

Bookrouter enables booksellers to list their inventory on up to 19 online selling venues. It configures the data for each site and offers a way to adjust prices on different venues.

FillZ.com allows you to list on all the major sites and allows dynamic price adjustment for each site.

The Art of Books handles repricing, order fulfillment, postage printing, and other tasks across all the major venues.

SellerMagic. For Amazon sellers, a repricer that enables you to put selected competitors into a separate group.

BookSku. Another tool for Amazon sellers that enables you to automatically reprice your inventory.

Monsoon is a service targeted at larger sellers using Amazon Marketplace and six other bookselling venues.

Seller Engine is for Amazon sellers. I don't like recommending Seller Engine because they quit supporting software that I and many other Amazon sellers bought from them about four years ago.