Guide
Most eBay sellers start repricing manually: open Sold listings, check the lowest active price, edit their own listing. It works for five items. At fifty it becomes a part-time job, and at five hundred it breaks entirely — prices drift stale overnight, winning bids slip to competitors, and panic cuts eat margin. This guide walks through every step of that manual process, pinpoints exactly where it fails, and shows how setting a hard price floor before you automate keeps you competitive without ever selling at a loss.
Here is what manual repricing actually looks like when done correctly — before automation enters the picture.
The manual loop has three structural failure points that compound as your catalog grows. First, staleness: competitors can relist or reprice within minutes of a market move, but you are checking prices at most once a day. A competitor who drops to undercut you at 9 AM captures all the traffic by the time you log in at 7 PM. Second, floor blindness: when you are moving fast through a spreadsheet, it is easy to set a price that feels competitive but is actually below your cost plus fees. A single mis-priced SKU can wipe out the margin from ten other sales. Third, human exhaustion: at around 80–120 active listings, the daily repricing task takes longer than the revenue it protects. Sellers either stop doing it or start doing it sloppily — both outcomes cost money.
A price floor is the lowest price you will ever accept for a specific item. You must calculate it per SKU before you reprice — manually or automatically. The formula is straightforward: Floor = (Cost + Shipping Out) / (1 − eBay Fee Rate) / (1 − Minimum Margin). Here is a concrete example for a used electronics accessory. Cost of goods: $8.00. Outbound shipping: $4.00. eBay final value fee: 13.25% (electronics category as of 2025). Minimum acceptable margin: 15%. Step one: total cash in = $8.00 + $4.00 = $12.00. Step two: divide by (1 − 0.1325) = $12.00 / 0.8675 = $13.83 to cover fees. Step three: divide by (1 − 0.15) = $13.83 / 0.85 = $16.27, which rounds up to a floor of $16.27. Set your floor at $16.27. No repricer — automated or manual — should ever move that listing below that number. If competitors are pricing below $16.27, you simply do not match them. You hold or you pull the listing.
Automation earns its keep at the point where manual checking costs more in time than it saves in margin. For most sellers that threshold is somewhere between 50 and 150 active listings. The critical design question is not speed — it is constraint. A repricer that only chases the lowest price without limits will eventually reach your cost, then go below it, because it has no way to know what your cost is. A floor-first repricer inverts the logic: you set the floor per SKU, and the repricer is only permitted to move the price between that floor and your ceiling. It will always try to beat the lowest competitor, but it physically cannot go below your floor. The result is that you stay competitive on listings where the market supports your margin, and you automatically hold firm on listings where competitors have priced themselves into losses — without you having to watch either situation manually. Undercut's 15-minute repricing interval on the Pro and Scale plans means your prices are never more than 15 minutes stale, which keeps you responsive in high-velocity categories like trading cards, media, and consumer electronics where prices move intraday. Scale adds capacity (up to 10,000 listings) and priority support on that same 15-minute cycle for sellers managing large catalogs in those categories.
Here is the complete workflow that combines the manual floor calculation with automated execution.
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How often should I reprice my eBay listings?
For slow-moving categories like clothing or antiques, once per day is often sufficient. For competitive categories like consumer electronics, trading cards, or media, competitors can reprice within minutes, so a 15-minute automated interval captures most opportunities without overcorrecting on every price tick.
What happens if a competitor prices below my floor?
A floor-first repricer holds your listing at your floor price rather than matching the competitor's unsustainable price. You may lose the sale on that item, but you do not sell at a loss. In practice, competitors who price below cost tend to either sell out quickly or reprice back up — at which point your listing automatically becomes the lowest again.
Can I set a different floor for each listing, or is it one global setting?
With Undercut, floors are per-listing. You set each listing's Floor Price in the dashboard, which is important because your cost basis, shipping weight, and category fee rate differ by SKU. A single global floor would either be too conservative on some items or too permissive on others.
Do eBay fees change by category, and does that affect my floor calculation?
Yes, meaningfully. eBay's final value fee rates vary from around 3% for heavy equipment to 15% for jewelry. If you use a single average rate for your floor formula, you will systematically under-calculate floors in high-fee categories. Check the current rate for each category you sell in — eBay publishes the full table in the Seller Center — and use the exact rate in the floor formula for that SKU.
Is there a risk that automated repricing will trigger eBay's duplicate listing policies?
Repricing an existing listing — changing its price — is entirely within eBay's policies. The duplicate listing concern arises if you create multiple listings for the same item. A repricer edits your existing listing's price field; it does not create new listings. That said, always confirm the repricer you use operates via eBay's official API to avoid any policy exposure.
Related: How to Avoid Selling Below Cost on eBay · What Is a Price Floor? · Manual vs. Automated Repricing · Repricing Without Losing Margin · eBay Seller Fees Explained