+ 39-02-82955-708
Request demo
Automated Time Pricing
✓ Easily manage promotions and markdowns without tedious manual operations and calculations.

✓ Automatically adjust prices during peak demand or when your competitors are asleep, and then automatically switch regular prices back.

✓ Maximize your sales and profits at every specific moment!
What is Time Pricing?
Time pricing in retail is adjusting (raising or cutting) prices for a specific time, aiming to gain more sales and/ or profits.
Such price adjustments can be regular or once, short term or relatively long term.
For what purposes
retailers leverage automated Time Pricing
With automated Time Pricing, retailers eliminate manual operations and human errors, while managing prices more efficiently and increasing sales and gross profit. Examples of Time Pricing employing:
  • Markdowns, sales, promotions, Black Fridays.
  • Agreements with suppliers with specific time limits.
  • Bypassing suppliers' price restrictions.
  • Night prices. For example, from 23.00 to 6.00, prices automatically increase and at 6.00 switch back to regular prices.
  • Weekend prices.
  • Prices for a surge demand time.
  • Prices for a major city event period.
What do retailers achieve with automated Time Pricing?
Delivering optimized prices - lower or higher, depending on specific conditions - at the accurately chosen time enables a retailer:
  • 1
    Increase gross margin at the time of surge demand and limited offer.

    Example.
    Your store is the only 24-hour pharmacy in a big district; the rest are closed at night.
    If you charge higher prices for at least a part of your assortment at nighttime, you will increase your margin and gross margin without losing sales.
  • 2
    Increase sales during hours when competitors are sleeping

    Example.
    Your online store gets a significant proportion of orders at night. You sell highly competitive goods; your prices are average in the market. You have launched a new "night" pricing strategy: from 23.00 to 7.00, lower prices appear on the site. As a result, night sales have risen 40%. The gross margin has increased by 18%.
    Competitors do not use automatic price monitoring systems, and their employees do not work at night. Therefore, they don't know about your new price strategy and so don't respond. Thus, average market prices remain at the same level, and the market marginality doesn't fall.
  • 3
    Increase sales of goods with RRPs.

    Example.
    You sell a highly competitive product with recommended retail price (RRP), in fact, minimum retail price. Your supplier monitors stores' prices manually. If the supplier company detects some store set the price lower than RRP, it raises cost price for such store; there is a special agreement about that.
    The supplier's employees sleep at night. You launch a new "night" pricing strategy: from 23.00 to 7.00, your website prices are lower than RRP. The number of "night" orders increases significantly; your store raises sales volume and gross margin.
    Every morning at 7.00, night prices automatically switch back to "day" regular prices with RRP. Your supplier doesn't detect that your price has been lower than RRP.
How Time Pricing Works with the Imprice Platform
Time Pricing is extremely difficult to implement in large retail without specialized agile pricing software.
Even organizing a "trivial" Black Friday is a huge headache for pricing specialists and e-commerce executives. A responsible specialist needs to:
✓ make lists of "Black Friday goods",
✓ calculate discount restrictions and limits for these SKUs,
✓ get an agreement with suppliers about this promotion,
✓ upload new "promo" prices to the website.
Some SKUs run out of stock during Black Friday, and their cost prices change. The company updates information about actual prices and stocks on the website with a delay. As a result, the retailer gains losses, selling some goods with a price lower than a cost price, and gets negative reaction of shoppers.

Or let's think about night prices. Who will daily "turn them on" at 11:00 PM, "switch them off" at 6:00 AM and check in the morning whether all prices were loaded onto the website correctly and there were no "bugs"?
With Imprice, Time Pricing is extremely easy for retailers to employ:
  • You set a schedule, specifying at what time your special prices should switch on and switch off.
    With Imprice, you can indicate:

    -- A single-time period of special prices. For example, you set the time of the start and the end of the promotion. Then at the beginning of your promo, Imprice will automatically switch on special prices, and at the end, it will automatically switch back to regular prices.

    -- A recurring period of special prices. For example, Imprice will switch on special prices daily at preset hours or on preset days of the week.
  • Your pricing specialist creates segments of SKUs, for which your company needs to set special prices. For such segments, the pricing specialist inputs into Imprice rules for calculating special prices.
    Imprice allows setting individual pricing rules for various brands, product groups, goods segments, and even specific SKUs.

    Pricing rules can automatically consider the current competitors' prices in every specific region, RRPs (recommend retail prices), local cost prices in various warehouses, the minimum allowable level of margin, specific agreements with suppliers, and other essential factors.
  • Imprice automatically adjusts special prices according to your pricing rules.
    Accurately on-time you specify, these prices appear in your ERP, on your website, in your mobile application.
    Imprice enables you to download the "promotion" products list from Imprice to prepare emails and promo pages, mark items' pages by promo symbols and automatically remove these symbols and update promo pages if the product's price changes or SKU is out of stock.
  • When the particular price period ended, Imprice automatically switches your prices back to regular prices.
    Imprice uploads back regular prices in your ERP, on the website, in the mobile app, precisely on the schedule you've set.
  • When important factors change - for example, the cost price of SKU - Imprice automatically adjusts your special price and updates it on your website, in ERP, in the mobile app.
    The minimum interval for recalculating prices is every 10 minutes.
Talk to Imprice pricing experts:
+39-02-82955-708