Quickstart: from signup to a connected account

Before You Start

Setup takes about 30 minutes of your time

Most of the work happens in the background. You connect your store, we import your catalogue and go looking for competitors, and you come back to a populated account. This guide walks through the whole path, from creating your login to reviewing a simulated price change — without changing a single price on your storefront.

Admin access to your store platform — Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce or Linnworks. No store platform? A Google Sheet works too.
Cost prices for the products you want to reprice. Margin protection can only work if Pricemaster knows what a product costs you. If your platform does not carry cost, you can upload a CSV later.
A short list of the competitors that matter to you. Pricemaster will find candidates automatically, but knowing who you care about makes the selection step much faster.
A little patience for the background jobs. The first product import and the first round of competitor scraping both run behind the scenes, so plan to come back to the account rather than sitting and waiting.

Nothing reaches your storefront during setup. New accounts have price pushing switched off. Pricemaster tracks the market and calculates prices, but nothing is written back to your store until the Pricemaster team switches pushing on for your account — normally once you have reviewed your data and are happy with your rules. Until then you will see a “Price pushing is switched off” banner in the app, and that is exactly what you want to see while you are learning the system.

Setup Checklist

Pricemaster tracks six setup steps for every new site

Your dashboard shows how many are complete, and the sidebar flags the ones still outstanding. You can see the full list, with a link straight into each one, on the onboarding overview page.

Step	What it means	Where you do it
1. Products	Your catalogue has been imported from your store or sheet.	Setup flow, then Products
2. Competitors matched	Pricemaster has searched for shops selling your products.	Setup flow
3. Competitors selected	You have chosen which of those competitors to track.	Setup flow, then Competitors
4. Minimum margins	You have set the floor below which prices must never fall.	Minimum Margins
5. Pricing rule	You have built your first pricing rule.	Rules
6. Simulated rule	You have run that rule as a simulation and reviewed the result.	Rules → Simulate

Steps 1 to 3 are enforced. Until your products are imported and you have chosen competitors, Pricemaster brings you back to the setup flow rather than letting you loose in an empty account. Steps 4 to 6 are tracked but not forced, so you can explore first and come back to them.

Step 1

Create your account and connect your store

1

Sign up at pricemaster.ai

Create your login at pricemaster.ai/signup, with an email address and password or by signing in with Google. You will be asked whether you are a retailer or a brand, then for your company name, industry and phone number.

This step is not optional and cannot be done from the app. app.pricemaster.ai has no sign-up form — you cannot sign in there until you have registered on pricemaster.ai. The one exception is an account the Pricemaster team built for you, in which case your login already exists and you can go straight to app.pricemaster.ai.

2

Add a site and confirm your business type

A fresh account has no sites, so the app opens on the site picker. Choose Add a site and confirm whether this one is a retail store or a brand catalogue — it is asked per site, so one account can hold both.

3

Pick your platform

Choose the platform that hosts your product catalogue: Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Google Sheets or Linnworks.

4

Complete the connection

Each platform has its own short connection guide with exactly which credentials to generate and where to find them.

Shopify

Connect with a custom-app access token or sign in through Shopify. See the Shopify guide.

Magento

Connect with a Magento integration access token. See the Magento guide.

WooCommerce

Approve the connection from your own WordPress admin — no key to copy. See the WooCommerce guide.

Linnworks

One connection reprices every sales channel you run through Linnworks. See the Linnworks guide.

Google Sheets

No platform connection needed — share a sheet with the right columns. See the Google Sheets guide.

Selling on more than one channel? If you run Amazon, eBay or other marketplaces through Linnworks, connect Linnworks rather than the individual storefront — one connection then covers every channel.

Step 2

Import your products

As soon as the connection is saved, Pricemaster starts pulling in your catalogue. The import screen shows live progress while it works, and the job keeps running even if you close the tab — you can come back to it later.

SKUs, names, barcodes and identifiers, prices, cost prices, stock levels and images come across, depending on what your platform holds.
When the import finishes, Pricemaster sets up a daily refresh automatically, so your catalogue keeps itself up to date from then on.
You land on the Products page with real data behind it.

1

Check the product count

Does it roughly match what you expect from your store? A count that is far too low usually means the connection is only seeing part of the catalogue — tell us and we will look at it with you.

2

Check your cost prices

Cost is what every margin calculation is built on. If your platform does not store cost prices, go to Site Settings → Manual Actions and use Import Cost Prices from CSV. You upload a file, map the SKU and cost columns, and import.

3

Hide anything you never want priced

If whole ranges are irrelevant — discontinued lines, internal SKUs, service items — tag them and use Site Settings → Product Visibility to hide products carrying those tags. Hidden products drop out of lists, reports, rules and competitor scraping.

Step 3

Find and select your competitors

Next, Pricemaster scans its network of 340+ retailers and the wider web to find shops selling your products. This runs automatically — there is nothing to configure and no URLs to paste.

1

Let the search run

A progress bar shows the search working through a sample of your catalogue. It takes a few minutes.

2

Tick the competitors you care about

Each candidate shows who they are and how much of your range they appear to carry. Select the retailers you genuinely price against — quality beats quantity here.

3

Nothing useful found? Refine or add manually

For niche or newly listed ranges, use Search specific products to pick a handful of your own products and re-run the search against those. There is also an Add one manually option where you can paste a competitor URL.

4

Click Start tracking

That closes out the competitor steps and takes you through to your dashboard. Matching and the first price collection then run in the background.

Give the data a day. Competitor prices arrive over the following hours as pages are crawled and matched, so your dashboard will look thin at first and fill out considerably by the next day. You can add, pause or remove competitors at any time from the Competitors page.

What Happens Next

You are connected. Now comes the pricing part.

At this point Pricemaster knows your products and is watching your market. What it still does not know is what you are willing to sell for, or how you want to react when a competitor moves. Those are the remaining three milestones, and they are covered properly in their own guide rather than squeezed in here.

4

Set your minimum margins

Your profit floor, set before any rule exists. Get this wrong and every rule you build afterwards produces prices you have to throw away.

Setting your minimum margins →

5

Build one narrow rule

Not your whole strategy — one rule, over one supplier or category, small enough that you can read every line of the result.

Building your first rule →

6

Simulate it, then go live carefully

See exactly what the rule would do to every product without touching your store, then release it in stages rather than all at once.

Simulating and going live →

Nothing has reached your storefront yet, and nothing will by accident. Every new site starts with price pushing switched off, so you can build and test freely. Continue with Your first steps after setup, which covers margins, rules, simulation, going live and what to watch in your first fortnight.