I plan to change my shipping prices

Updated by Constance Colboc

There is a fundamental issue with managing your prices when you change your shipping prices on a sales channel. This problem exists even when you don’t use a repricer, but a repricer accentuates it.

Suppose you increase your shipping prices: mechanically, your landed prices (landed price = listing price + shipping price) increase immediately. If your goal is to maintain competitive prices, you then need to lower your listing prices. With a repricer, your prices will remain uncompetitive until the repricer has received the updated shipping prices and completed the update of your listing prices.

Now suppose you decrease your shipping prices: now your prices may be too low and unprofitable. What’s worse, until it has received and processed your new shipping prices, your repricer may continue to make recommendations in which it deducts your old shipping price from a target landed price.

You must take this problem into account when changing your shipping prices or your shipping price policy on sales channels. Here we list strategies that you may use to protect yourself from its consequences.

Steps to change my shipping prices

Avoid lowering your shipping prices the day before a bank holiday, on a Friday, or when you are not able to closely monitor your prices.
If lowering your shipping prices, ensure that you have appropriate price bounds in place that do not depend on your shipping prices. If you have bounds that depend on your landed prices or landed margin, ensure that you have shipping-independent parameters in place and refer to the precedence rules of price bound parameters.

For example, if you have a min_landed_price_inc_vat, ensure you also have a min_listing_price_inc_vat.

If you have a min_landed_margin_rate at the catalog level, ensure you have a min_listing_margin_rate at the catalog level.

If you have a min_landed_margin_rate at the product level, ensure you have a min_listing_margin_rate at the product level.

  1. If in doubt, contact us several days prior to performing the operation
  2. Disable automatic pricing in Multiply on the affected catalog and wait 10 minutes
  3. Update your overridden shipping prices in Multiply, if any
  4. If lowering your shipping prices, perform a manual price change to increase your listing prices sufficiently to cover your shipping price decrease
  5. Change your shipping prices on the sales channel, observing the sales channel’s safety recommendations
  6. Ensure that your new shipping prices are effective on the marketplace
  7. If using overridden shipping prices, ensure Multiply has fully processed your feed or upload without error and wait at least 20 minutes before enabling automatic pricing again
  8. If you do not use overridden shipping prices on all your catalog items, wait until Multiply has seen all your updated shipping prices (open a support ticket if needed)
  9. Review your recommendations in Multiply to ensure they are correct
  10. Enable automatic pricing
  11. Review and monitor your prices on the sales channel in order to ensure your prices are correct.


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