Repricing covers everything from a store owner manually editing prices in a spreadsheet on Monday morning to a system that adjusts thousands of SKUs automatically every hour. The mechanism varies, but the goal is the same: keep prices in the right place relative to competitors, costs, and demand.
Manual repricing works for small catalogues and slow-moving categories. The store owner checks competitor prices weekly, makes adjustments where needed, and moves on. The limit is roughly a few hundred SKUs across a handful of competitors. Past that, the spreadsheet stops being a tool and becomes a liability.
Automated repricing replaces the spreadsheet with rules. The merchant defines logic ("match the lowest competitor minus 1%, but never below cost plus 25%"), and the system applies it continuously. The merchant moves from doing the work to designing the rules.
Prices in e-commerce are not set, they are constantly negotiated. A product priced correctly today is mis priced by next week if competitors move and you do not. Without repricing, you are either leaving margin on the table (priced too low) or losing sales (priced too high), and you usually find out months later from the revenue numbers.
Example: A Shopify store with 1,200 SKUs and 8 main competitors switches from weekly manual repricing to automated rules. Within a month, average margin holds steady but revenue lifts 9%, because prices that were stuck too high on slower-moving SKUs are now finding the right level automatically.