Amazon's pricing strategy applied to your store

Amazon adjusts prices between 2 and 5 times a day per SKU. It does it with thousands of machines. Your €1M-20M ecommerce doesn't need that power — but it does need to ask which parts of that strategy make sense to replicate.

What Amazon does that you can copy

• Continuous monitoring of competitor prices on key SKUs
• Adjustment rules: "if they drop more than X%, I match up to Y%"
• Price history: learning the seasonality and elasticity of each SKU
• Differentiation between hero SKUs (defend position) and the rest of the catalog (defend margin)

What Amazon does that you don't need

• Hourly automated changes without human supervision
• Predictive algorithms based on machine learning with thousands of variables
• Per-user personalized pricing (legally and reputationally risky in Europe)

The minimum viable system

To get started you don't need algorithms. You need three things: continuous visibility of competitor prices, clear rules for what to do with each move, and a weekly human review process.

• Visibility: a tool that shows you updated prices at least once a day
• Rules: per SKU, decide whether you defend price or position. Define the threshold ("if I lose position 1 to Carrefour, I match within 24h")
• Process: one person on the team reviews alerts every morning, decides which changes to apply and executes them in a batch

When to automate more

Only once the manual process is already stabilized. If you don't have the weekly process working, adding automation only amplifies the mistakes. The practical rule: 6 months of manual pricing with history, then you automate low-risk decisions (matching the price on non-hero SKUs) and leave the high-risk ones (defend or attack) manual.

The goal isn't to compete with Amazon on speed. It's to not lose sales because you found out too late that the market moved. That gap is covered with automated monitoring and clear rules, not sophisticated algorithms.