How to define your pricing strategy
Pricing across multiple markets
By adopting key pricing principles, you’ll gain the processes and tools needed to take full control of your pricing strategy. This helps you eliminate costly mistakes that could significantly reduce your overall margin.
Managing prices for 50 products is easy. However, our data shows that an average product manager is responsible for around 8,000 products—far too many to give each one proper attention. As a result, pricing often happens only at the moment of listing, with initial prices left unchanged for long periods. This leads to significant inefficiencies.
What if a product becomes outdated in the meantime? What if products within the same category are priced arbitrarily, making it impossible to assess whether the category as a whole is performing well? What if a top-selling product is priced too low, causing unnecessary margin loss? Or if a poorly selling product has the potential to become a bestseller with just a slight price adjustment?
Without a systematic approach to pricing, these critical questions remain unanswered, and untapped profit opportunities slip through the cracks.
| ID produktu | Purchase price | Selling price |
|---|---|---|
| 20100 | € 1415 | € 1890 |
| 20101 | € 1520 | € 1440 |
| 20102 | € 1790 | € 1990 |
Is it immediately clear from the table which product is most likely mispriced? Of course—20101. Now imagine having to answer this question not for three products, but for 25,000.
Can you confidently ensure that none of them are being sold at a loss? Even if you use Excel, over time, errors creep in, human mistakes occur, and daily checks become increasingly difficult. Are you certain that all your listed products are actually in stock? You could be losing sales simply because customers can’t buy what’s no longer available.
With strategically managed pricing, you introduce simple yet powerful principles into your pricing process—such as dynamic pricing based on stock turnover or automated price adjustments linked to purchase costs. These ensure you never unintentionally misprice your products again.
A clear overview of your pricing strategy gives you two key ways to improve your competitiveness.
First, you’ll have the tools to ensure your products aren’t priced too high or too low—relative to the market, sales performance, and stock levels.
Second, you’ll gain insights into your competitors’ pricing, which you can leverage for reporting and analysis—such as negotiating better terms with suppliers. Learn more about this in the chapter Pricing, data, and supplier relationships.
A few years ago, we attended a management meeting at one of our clients—an e-commerce company operating in 12 Western European markets. The meeting focused on pricing performance, and the management team also requested additional recommendations from us.
As we walked through the key steps, the head of marketing suddenly perked up: “Am I understanding this correctly? We now have a clear and transparent margin breakdown by category? Can I get access to that? This would be incredibly useful for our marketing team to optimize ROAS and drive higher profitability.”
By implementing strategic pricing tools and processes, you gain transparency, control, and the ability to react quickly to market changes. Pricing will no longer be an afterthought when setting long-term business goals—it will become an active part of strategic planning.
Are you entering a new market? Launching a private-label brand? Shifting from a budget-focused approach to a premium positioning? Pricing, alongside other marketing efforts, will help you steer and control your strategy’s success. You’ll know exactly where—and why—you should compete on price and where to hold firm on higher margins.
Too often, we see businesses expanding into foreign markets, investing tens or even hundreds of millions in marketing and logistics, only to set product prices based purely on exchange rates. Instead of taking a systematic pricing approach that accounts for market specifics, they miss the opportunity to optimize for success. A well-planned pricing strategy can make all the difference in ensuring a profitable expansion.
At the end of each chapter, we’ll provide a set of questions. We recommend going through them using real data from your business. Instead of just reading information you might forget, this approach turns it into a valuable workshop with deeper insights.
