This article will explain why Shopify price automation is critical for an eCommerce business, what it means precisely, different use cases, and how you can implement it.
How does Shopify pricing automation work?
Pricing automation means the price of one or more products will change automatically when certain conditions are met.
For example, when one of your competitors has decreased the price of a specific product, you can automatically decrease it too.
As another example, when the sales of a particular product have increased, you can also increase its price automatically to generate more revenue.
There are multiple ways you can automate pricing for your products:
- You can install an app from the Shopify App Store.
- You can use Zapier to connect with your Shopify webhooks.
- You can create a custom app for your store.
The fastest way to automate your product prices is to install an app from the Shopify App Store.
We’ve put together a list of the best Shopify Price Automation apps categorized by use cases so you can get up and running in no time.
Top Shopify Apps that change prices automatically
Before deciding which apps are best for you and your specific business, you should read the whole list.
Each category focuses on a different aspect of price automation, starting with price monitoring and moving all the way to automatically sending an email when your prices have decreased.
Best competitor price tracking and dynamic pricing apps
Prisync ‑ Best App for Dynamic Pricing
Even though this app is the most expensive of all other apps on this list, it certainly provides excellent value compared to its cost.
Prisync is a Shopify pricing optimization app that considers your competitors’ pricing and automatically changes the prices of your products to match or beat them.
You might have an Excel or Google spreadsheet that you constantly update to keep track of your competitors pricing. If you sell the same products, you need to know all price movements.
Updating this spreadsheet can take a long time, not to mention you have to do it every day. Otherwise, you might fall behind.
Prisync takes this tedious process and automates it. It lets you automatically track and compare prices with any website worldwide. With just a few clicks, you’ll have new and comprehensive data you can rely on.
But of course, that’s not all. Since you have all this data at your fingertips, you can use Prisync to apply intelligent, dynamic pricing rules and get that competitive edge. Increase sales and profit margins while your prices are on auto-pilot, strictly following your directions.
The app lets you track an unlimited number of competitors (even Amazon) with its cheapest plan.
Your product variants might have different prices depending on what you’re selling. Certain color variations might be more expensive than others (like some mobile phones), or the price can vary based on the size of the product (think of TVs and Monitors).
If that’s the case, then you have nothing to worry about. You can use Prisync to track the price of each variant and even change it automatically.
To truly understand how this feature can help you, think of something you are currently selling with multiple variants at different price points. If your competitors have increased the price of that specific variant, you can automatically decrease it by a few percentages. This would allow you to steal clients from your competitors and significantly boost your bottom line.
If you want to leverage these automations, you must buy Prisync. Its price starts at $129/month and gives you access to everything.
They also have a higher-tiered plan that goes for $229/month. The extra $90 gives you access to price history, instant price change notifications, advanced mail reports, and pricing analytics.
Prisync comes with a 14-day free trial, so you can use the app without committing to a plaid plan.
PriceMole – Best App for Competitor Price and Inventory Tracking
The second app on this list is PriceMole. It lets you track your competitors’ prices and stock in real-time. You can use this data to update your prices and stock levels to stay one step ahead of everyone else.
What takes this app apart from the crowd is its machine learning-powered dynamic pricing strategy. This means that its AI recommends the most profitable price available for your products based on things like:
- your cost,
- competitor’s prices,
- market trends,
- psychological pricing.
The app creators claim that their AI-based pricing strategy can earn Shopify store owners more profits than the conventional “beat lowest competitor” strategy.
What happens to the other smaller ones? Instead of digging for your competitors, you can use Pricemole. The app has an automated competitor discovery and matching algorithm that can do the repetitive heavy lifting.
You might expect a high cost with so many features, but this depends on how many SKUs you want to track.
Pricemole’s lowest plan starts at $59 per month and lets you track up to 100 SKUs. You can get this data from 5 competitors (which Pricemole can automatically discover for you) and can expect updates as often as four times a day.
This plan also gets you automated AI-based automated pricing and import/export functionality.
If you want to track up to 5000 SKUs, you’ll need the most expensive plan. This goes for $399 per month and comes with everything in the previous one, with a few differences:
- You can track unlimited competitors;
- Get unlimited automatches;
- Recrawl up to 500 URLs;
- Display an Unbranded Competitor Widget which shows your clients that your products are the best bang for their buck.
If you need even more than that, you’ll have to contact their support for a special plan.
EcoPrice ‑ Cheapest Price Automation Shopify App
The last app in this category is EcoPrice, which is also the cheapest one, but don’t let that fool you.
EcoPrice does the same thing as all the other apps in this category – it tracks your competitors’ prices and automatically changes yours using artificial intelligence. This will help you get the edge, especially if you are just starting out.
The app is relatively new compared to the previous ones. It was launched in July 2021. This might explain their aggressive pricing strategy.
EcoPrice’s cheapest plan starts at $19 per month and lets you automatically price up to 100 products. With this plan, you can track prices from 2 marketplaces (like eBay or Amazon) but also from unlimited single shop URLs.
At the same time, you’ll get access to the dynamic prices functionality, receive daily reports and enjoy active support.
As with the other apps, the most expensive plan (Business Plan) lets you track up to 5000 products from unlimited marketplaces and single shops. This also comes with personal support.
If you want to track even more products, you’ll have to get in touch with them.
Best Shopify app to automate product discounts
The previous dynamic pricing apps work great if you sell standard products found in other stores or marketplaces. But what if you are selling hand-made items?
In that case, you’ll need an app that automates prices on your store based on your input.
Bulk Price Editor/Price Change – Best Shopify price automation app for hand-made products stores
Price Scheduler Plus is a powerhouse when it comes to price automation. It has an overall rating of 4.4 stars out of 52 reviews, which shows that store owners believe this app boosted their sales and made their lives easier.
Think of Price Scheduler Plus as a bulk price editor with automation capabilities. It lets you create a quick sale and increase or decrease prices at any point in the future.
In terms of price change options, you can:
- Increase or decrease the price by a percentage (5% increase or 10% decrease);
- Increase or decrease the price by a flat amount ($5 decrease);
- Set the price to a specific amount (set all products from a category to have the same price);
- Change the price of a product by its production cost (say it costs you $5 to create a candle, you can set its price to $10);
- Import prices from a CSV.
You can even filter based on product, collection, or tag when setting up prices for your products.
Say Christmas is coming up, and you want to run a promo for your Winter themed products. You can easily schedule this sale in advance by filtering that specific category and applying the discount only for it.
Now say Christmas has passed and you want to revert to the original prices. Price Scheduler Plus will take care of that for you.
The app has a free plan which lets you automate 100 product variant price changes per month. For $9.95 per month, you can automate up to 1000 product variant prices.
The best deal for big stores is the $19.95 per month plan as it doesn’t have any restrictions on the number of product variant prices you can automate.
Next, I’ll cover an app that automatically changes prices based on your product sales. You can use this app to run flash sales and get a quick boost in revenue.
Dynamic Pricing – Best Shopify app to automate prices based on product sales volume
Dynamic Pricing is a must-have app for all Shopify stores. It lets you automate discounts based on product sales. To better put that into perspective, here are a few examples:
- Say you have a product that sells for $10. You can use the app to drop the price of that product if there have been no sales of that particular product during a month.
- If you have a product that goes for $5 and you notice a spike in sales, you can use the app to increase that product’s price.
As was the case for the previous app, you can set prices based on percentages or flat rates. Configure when the discount campaigns run and on what products by filtering based on tag, collection, or individual products.
This app’s great because the discount campaigns you set up will start working by default, automating your product prices.
Moreover, you can apply a rule that will change prices across your whole store based on sales. Say in a specific month, your selected products have each generated $1000 of revenue. If that happens, the app can increase all your prices by $1, which is pretty neat.
You can get Dynamic Pricing for $9.95 per month. The basic plan lets you automate the prices of unlimited products or variants by setting an unlimited number of rules. They also have a yearly plan which you can get for $94.45 per year.
The Priority Support plan goes for $18.95 per month (an extra $9/month). This plan gets you a dedicated manager and up to 3 hours per month of custom work done on your store. At the same time, the app creators will set everything up for you.
Now that I covered the first Shopify price automation apps category, it’s time to move to other use cases. The following app will notify your customers about price drops. After all, if you want to sell something, you have to tell people about it.
This app works great with previous ones and can help you boost sales.
Best Shopify app to notify your customers about price drops
Considering you already installed an app that dynamically adjusts your prices based on your competitors, you now need a way to inform customers about it automatically.
Alert Me! Price Alerts – Cheapest Shopify app to notify your customers about price drops
This app does only one thing – it sends an email to your customers when a product price has dropped. People can sign up to receive these emails from a product page using an intuitive interface.
What’s great about it is that it works out of the box regardless of your theme. Just install the app, and your clients can immediately sign up to receive email notifications.
If there is a problem with your theme, you can always ask for their support for help.
Alert Me! works best when combined with a dynamic price app. Say, for example, that one of your competitors has decreased the price of a product that you are also selling.
One of the previously presented apps will drop the price on your website. This will immediately trigger an email notification for your customers so they know that you have the best price around.
The app costs $5 per month and comes with a 21-day free trial, so you can see if it’s a good fit for your store.
For the cost of a coffee, you also get daily, weekly, or monthly email updates on what products generated the most sign-ups. You can use this data to drop the price of a specific product for a quick boost in sales.
Last but not least, we’ll look at a price automation app that can help you understand what price works better for your products.
Best Shopify app to automate price A/B testing
A/B testing is a proven method to increase conversions. Through testing, you can find out what works best for your customers in terms of UX and UI. But what if you want to see what price point works better for your customers?
Dynamic Price A/B Testing – Best Shopify app to automate price A/B testing
Switch helps stores run price A/B tests to determine the best price for each product. Price A/B testing is used widely in eCommerce to maximize revenue. Companies like Amazon can use this information to set prices on their products.
To try out this app, all you need to do is install it with a single click, create your test price, and run the experiment. You’ll be able to see exactly what price point converts better and implement it after just a few days (depending on your store’s traffic, of course).
Using Zapier to automate pricing on Shopify
You can use Shopify’s webhooks and Zapier to automate the process even further.
Webhooks are a way for apps (like Shopify) to tell other apps (like Zapier) that an event has happened—for example, you’re running low on stock for a product. When Shopify notifies Zapier of these events, Zapier can do something in return—for example, it can automatically lower the price for that item so it sells faster.
The first step is connecting Shopify and Zapier. To do this, go to the Apps page in Shopify, scroll down until you see Webhooks, click Connect next to Zapier, and follow the instructions for authorizing Zapier and giving it permissions in Shopify. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to start building zaps!
Conclusion
This sums up the list of Shopify apps that you can use to automate prices.
For the best results, I suggest you install an app that sets your prices based on your competitors and the app that sends your customers an email when a product price has decreased.
It all depends on what kind of store you run and what products you sell. The best way to go is to experiment with the apps, try each one of them by using their free trial and see what moves the needle in terms of revenue.
