Prices that move on their own
but never below cost
Manual price updates lag behind cost changes and competitor moves, and the one mistake that actually costs money, a price that slips below cost, usually happens quietly until someone adds up a month of margin. We build an agent that applies your pricing rules continuously and physically cannot let an order go out below the floor you set.
The process today
Prices set manually drift from the costs underneath them, because updating a price is a task someone has to remember to do and cost changes, a supplier increase, a currency shift, a shipping surcharge, do not announce themselves loudly enough to trigger that memory every time. E-commerce operators running catalogues of any real size commonly find, when they finally audit it, that a meaningful share of SKUs have been priced below current cost for weeks or months without anyone noticing, because the loss on any single order is small enough to not show up until it is added across hundreds of orders.
Competitive repricing has the opposite problem: done manually it is either too slow to matter, a competitor drops their price and yours stays stale for days, or it is done carelessly enough to chase a price war down to a margin nobody intended. Automated repricing tools exist, but most apply rules blindly without a hard floor, which means the same tool built to protect margin can be the exact thing that destroys it if a rule misfires during a traffic spike or a scraping error.
What the agent does
Applies your actual pricing rules continuously, whatever logic your team defines (cost-plus, competitor-matched within a band, category-specific margin targets), recalculated as often as the underlying data changes rather than on a manual schedule.
Enforces a hard margin floor at the system level, not as a soft warning but as an actual block: no price calculation, no matter what rule or exception triggered it, can push a live price below the cost floor you define.
Monitors competitor pricing within your defined rule set, adjusting within the band you set rather than chasing a race to the bottom, and flagging when a competitor’s price would require breaching your own floor to match.
Factors in real-time cost changes, a supplier price increase, a currency shift, a shipping cost update, so a price recalculates against current reality instead of a cost figure that was accurate when someone last updated it.
Alerts before a SKU breaches its margin floor, not after, giving a human the chance to adjust a rule or accept a temporary loss leader deliberately rather than discovering it after the fact.
Holds promotions and exceptions in a manual override queue, so a deliberate loss-leader sale or a one-off discount code is a decision a person makes explicitly, logged and time-bound, not something the automated rule set has to guess at.
What stays with humans
The agent applies rules, it does not set the strategy behind them. Defining the actual margin floor, the competitive positioning band, and which categories get aggressive versus conservative pricing is a business decision your team makes, reviewed periodically. Any promotion, loss leader or deliberate below-normal pricing goes through the manual override queue as an explicit, time-bound decision, never something the automated rule set infers on its own.
Guards
A parallel-run period where the agent calculates prices without pushing them live, so your team checks its output against real catalogue data before any price actually changes on a live store. The margin floor is enforced at the system level as a hard block, not a configurable soft rule that a bug could bypass. Every price change logs the rule that triggered it and the cost figure behind it, for full auditability. Rate limits prevent repricing more often than your platform’s API allows, and a kill switch reverts to manually set prices instantly.
Price and timeline
| Package | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Single automation | from $1,800 | One catalogue with rule-based repricing and a hard margin floor |
| Department package | from $2,500 | Pricing rules plus catalogue sync and listing generation across your full channel footprint |
7 to 14 days, most of it spent encoding your actual pricing rules and running a parallel calculation period before any live price changes.
Related
Depends on the same source-of-truth catalogue as catalogue sync between stores and feeds the numbers behind marketplace listing generation. Works closely with database reports for margin trend visibility over time. Part of automation of everything digital and built the way we build AI agents for our own products. Our own numbers come directly from this kind of guard: our own marketplace ProBay with an AI agent team and digital goods marketplace automation.
Tell us which catalogue and which margin rules you want enforced and we will send back a fixed price and a plan for the first week: get in touch.
Tired of doing this by hand? We can take the whole routine off your team, not just this step: Routine takeover, from $400 →
FAQ
How much does an AI pricing and margin guard agent cost?
A single catalogue with rule-based repricing and a margin floor starts from $1,800. A department package covering pricing plus catalogue sync and listing generation starts from $2,500, with the exact price depending on SKU count and how many competitor sources are monitored.
How long does it take to go live?
7 to 14 days: encoding your actual pricing rules and margin floors per category, connecting cost and competitor data sources, and a parallel-run period where the agent calculates prices without actually pushing them live, so your team checks its output against real numbers first.
Which tools does it connect to?
Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon and similar platforms for live pricing, your cost and inventory system for real-time margin calculation, competitor monitoring tools or direct marketplace scraping within terms of service, and Claude for resolving pricing exceptions that a flat rule set does not cover.
What if the agent sets a price wrong?
The margin floor is a hard block enforced at the system level, so no rule error or edge case can push a live price below your defined cost threshold. Every price change logs the rule that triggered it, and anything outside normal bounds (a swing larger than your defined threshold) holds for a human to confirm before going live.
Is our cost and pricing data safe?
The agent reads only the cost, inventory and pricing data you connect it to, under credentials you control, and does not retain or expose your cost structure outside the pricing calculation itself. Margin data is never shared with any external pricing or competitor tool.