How pricing between Leadtime and In Stock (DC) offers work and how Palmetrics handles it.

How the margins work

DC sales are sold from Takealot's Distribution Centers ("In Stock" or "DC") and thus take preference over Leadtime ("LT") sales due to the difference in delivery times.

For example, imagine a scenario where:

In this context, Seller-DC will win because they are selling DC against only one LT offer.

Seller-LT must sell the product at a price which is sufficiently cheaper than Seller-DC to win the buybox. The necessary price difference depends on an unknown algorithm, with inputs such as delivery times, stock levels etc., which are not shared by Takealot.

Vice-versa: Seller-DC can maintain a price which is more expensive than Seller-LT while retaining the winning bid, and again this price difference varies from product to product based on a combination of unknown factors as mentioned previously.

<aside> 📢 Takealot updated these margins on 30 June 2022 from a fixed ~5% for all products to dynamic values per-product. The necessary price difference for a product depends on an unknown algorithm, with inputs such as delivery times, stock levels etc., which are not shared by Takealot.

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How Auto-Pricing handles it

When you enable Auto-Pricing for a product, Palmetrics starts with a safe default margin setting and increasing or decreasing this margin as necessary to win the buybox per product.

This means that some DC products might win against LT products at 30% more expensive while other products might only be able to price at 10% more expensive while still winning. The same applies to LT products bidding against DC products.

You do not need to configure anything, Palmetrics handles this automatically.