Your first steps after setup
Your store is connected and your products are in. This is what to do next, in order — protect your margins, build one rule, simulate it, and only then let it run.
Connected is not the same as live
At this point Pricemaster knows your products and has started watching the market. What it does not yet know is what you are willing to sell for, or how you want to respond to a competitor. That is what the next four steps are for, and they should be done in this order — each one depends on the one before it.
The setup bar tells you where you are
While setup is unfinished, a slim progress bar sits across the top of every page showing five milestones and a “Go live” destination. Three of them are already behind you.
| Milestone | What ticks it off | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Import products | Your first catalogue import finishing | Done during setup |
| Find competitors | Approving your competitor or retailer list | Done during setup |
| Minimum margins | Adding your first price band | Step 1 below |
| Pricing rules | Saving your first rule | Step 2 below |
| Test a rule | Running your first simulation | Step 3 below |
Set your minimum margins before you build anything
A minimum margin is a floor. It is the least profit you are prepared to make on a product, and it is the single most important safety net in the system. Every rule that follows a competitor checks the floor before it commits a price — so if a competitor goes below your floor, Pricemaster stops at the floor instead of following them down.
Set floors first. A rule built before the floors exist will happily calculate prices you would never accept, and you will spend your first simulation reading numbers you have to throw away.
The default margin
Open Minimum Margins and set the default first. This applies to every product that does not match a more specific band, so treat it as your worst-acceptable-case across the whole catalogue rather than your target. If you are not sure, start conservative — a floor that is slightly too high blocks a few price cuts, while a floor that is too low quietly lets them all through.
Price bands, and the thing everyone gets wrong
Bands let you vary the floor across your range, which matters because a flat percentage rarely works everywhere. A twenty percent margin on a three pound accessory is sixty pence, which will not cover the picking cost; the same twenty percent on a five hundred pound machine may be more than you need to win the sale.
A few things worth knowing about how bands resolve:
- Each band is a cost range and a percentage. The percentage is a true gross margin on the selling price, not a markup on cost — a 25% floor on a £30 cost gives a £40 floor price, not £37.50.
- A band beats the default. If a product’s cost falls inside a band, that band’s percentage applies instead of the default.
- You can add an optional cash floor alongside the percentage, for cheap products where a percentage alone leaves too little in absolute terms.
- A per-product override beats everything. If one SKU needs its own floor regardless of its band, set it on the product and nothing else will override it.
- Bands can also be scoped to a supplier rather than the whole catalogue, which is useful when one brand has a distribution agreement you have to respect.
A sensible starting point
Set a conservative default
Pick a number you would accept on almost anything. You are going to refine this once you have seen a simulation, so it does not need to be perfect.
Add a band for your cheapest products
Low-cost lines usually need a higher percentage to be worth handling at all. This is where the optional cash floor earns its keep.
Add a band for your most expensive products
High-cost lines can normally survive a thinner percentage, and holding an unnecessarily high floor here is what stops you competing on your headline products.
Check the bands cover your whole cost range
Look for gaps between bands. Anything falling in a gap silently drops back to the default, which is usually not what you intended.
Build one narrow rule, not your whole strategy
The temptation is to build the rule you eventually want: everything, all products, full automation. Do not. Build something small enough that you can read every line of the simulation and say whether it is right. You will learn more from one rule over two hundred products than from one rule over twenty thousand.
The rule builder
Creating a rule walks you through four steps.
Rule basics
Name it something you will recognise in three months. “Follow cheapest, power tools” beats “Rule 1” the first time you have six of them.
Apply to products
Choose which products the rule covers — by supplier, category, tag or an explicit list. For a first rule, pick one supplier or category with good competitor coverage.
Strategy
Decide how the price is calculated. This is the part that matters, and the options are covered below.
Start, finish and launch
Review and save. Saving a rule does not run it, and running it does not push it — there are two more gates after this one.
Choosing a strategy
Follow the market
Price against what competitors are doing. Pick your reference point — the cheapest competitor, the second or third cheapest, the median market price, or one named competitor — then say whether to go below, match, or sit above it, by a fixed amount or a percentage.
Choosing second or third cheapest rather than cheapest is often the better trade. It keeps you visibly competitive without chasing the one outlier who is clearing stock.
Flat margin
Price from your own numbers instead of the market: a fixed percentage on cost price, or off your retail price. Use it where competitor coverage is thin, or for own-brand lines where there is nothing meaningful to follow.
You can add a creep rule so the price still drifts toward the market when competitor data does exist, while keeping the flat calculation as the base.
How multiple rules resolve
Once you have more than one rule, order decides everything. The rules list is drag-to-reorder, rules are evaluated top to bottom, and the first rule that matches a product wins — the ones below it are not consulted for that product. So put your narrow, specific rules above your broad catch-all ones. A catch-all sitting at the top will swallow everything beneath it.
Simulate, and actually read the results
Simulation runs your rule across its products and shows exactly what it would do — without touching your store. It runs in the background, so on a large catalogue you can start it and come back.
Reading the results
The results page groups products by what would happen: priced, increased, decreased, unchanged, and not actionable. Each row shows the SKU, name, supplier, the previous price and the new price. All figures are shown excluding tax, which catches people out if they are mentally comparing against tax-inclusive shelf prices.
Work through it in this order:
- Start with the decreases, largest first. This is where the money leaks. A handful of very large drops almost always means bad data rather than a real market move — a wrong competitor match, a bundle priced as a single unit, or a cost price that never imported.
- Then check the increases. Large increases are usually products where competitors have gone out of stock, so the remaining market price is unrepresentative. Worth sanity-checking before you let them ship.
- Then look at what did not move, and why. Products held at the floor tell you your minimum margins are working. Products with no market price tell you your competitor coverage has gaps.
- Finally, spot-check ten products by hand. Open them, look at the competitor prices behind the calculation, and satisfy yourself the answer is right. Ten is enough to find a systematic problem.
Why a product might not move
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum margin guard | The rule wanted to go lower, and your floor stopped it. The system is working as designed. | Nothing — unless it is happening to most of your catalogue, which means your floors are too high to compete. |
| No market price | There is no usable competitor price for this product, so a follow rule has nothing to follow. | Improve competitor coverage for that range, or apply a flat-margin rule to it instead. |
| Resulting margin over 50% | A built-in safety stop. If a calculation would put you above a 50% margin, Pricemaster assumes the input is wrong rather than that you have found free money. | Check the product’s cost price. This nearly always means cost is missing or wrong. |
| No cost price | Margin cannot be calculated at all, so the product is skipped. | Get costs into the import, or upload them by CSV. |
| Price difference over 100% | The calculated price is more than double or less than half the current one — almost always a mismatch. | Check the competitor matches on that product before doing anything else. |
Going live, in the right order
There are three separate gates between a rule and your storefront, and they exist so that no single mistake can reprice your catalogue. Open them one at a time.
Send a small batch by hand
From a simulation you have reviewed, select a handful of products and send those price changes. Then go and look at your storefront. Confirm the price you expected is the price that appears, including tax handling.
Ask for price pushing to be switched on
This is controlled by the Pricemaster team, not by you, and it is deliberate. Talk to them once you have a simulation you are happy with. Until it is on, your rules calculate but nothing is written back.
Set a run schedule — last, not first
Until you set one, rules only run when you click Run Rule yourself, and the rules page shows a “No automatic run enabled” banner. Set a daily or weekly schedule under Site Settings → Schedules when you are ready for it to happen without you.
If your account is on a managed trial, automated repricing stays off and manual pushes are capped per day. That is not a fault — it is what makes it safe to experiment on a live store. Talk to the Pricemaster team when you want the cap lifted.
Your first two weeks
The first fortnight is about data quality far more than it is about strategy. Almost every disappointing result in month one traces back to a competitor match that was wrong, or a cost price that was missing.
Days 1–3
Check the dashboard daily. Watch the number of products with competitor prices climb as the first full scrape completes — it does not all arrive at once.
Spot-check ten competitor matches by opening the competitor URL and confirming it is genuinely the same product, not a similar one.
Days 4–7
Re-run your simulation now that coverage has improved, and compare it against the first one. The differences tell you how much of week one’s result was just missing data.
Adjust your minimum margins based on what you have seen, rather than on what you guessed in step one.
Week 2
Widen your first rule, or add a second one for another supplier or category. Keep them narrow enough to reason about.
Set your run schedule and let it work unattended for a few days before you change anything else.
Ongoing
Review price changes weekly at first, then monthly. Watch for rules that never fire — usually a sign a broader rule above them is winning every product.
Add competitors as you notice them. Coverage is the thing that most improves results over time.
When something looks wrong
| Symptom | Usual cause | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| My rule did nothing at all | Another rule above it matched those products first, or the rule matched no products. | The rules list — check ordering, then the rule’s product selection. |
| Almost everything is held at the floor | Minimum margins are set above what the market will bear for that range. | Minimum Margins — compare your bands against actual cost prices. |
| One product has a wild price | A wrong competitor match — frequently a multipack, a spare part, or a different capacity of the same model. | The product’s competitor list. Unmatch anything that is not the same item. |
| Prices are right in Pricemaster, wrong on my store | A tax basis mismatch between what Pricemaster holds and what your platform displays. | Your platform’s integration guide, then tell the Pricemaster team — do not correct it by adjusting rules. |
| Nothing has changed on my store at all | Price pushing has not been switched on yet, or no run schedule is set. | The rules page banner, then ask the Pricemaster team about pushing. |
| My competitor prices look stale | A competitor URL has stopped resolving — retailers change their URLs constantly. | Competitors, sorted by last-seen date. |