Every price Apex sets comes out of the same sequence. Knowing it makes the Decisions table readable at a glance and tells you which lever to pull when a price is not what you expected.
The sequence
1. A trigger arrives
A decision starts when one of these happens:
- Amazon reports an offer change on the ASIN (a rival’s price, a Buy Box change, an offer appearing or leaving).
- You save a cost, a Min or Max price, or a shipping override on the product’s Amazon card, or assign the offer to a strategy.
- The floor sweep finds a live price under its current floor.
- A business offer changes, when the strategy has business pricing on.
Apex works on offers (one SKU on one Amazon channel), not products. A product with an FBA offer and a merchant-fulfilled offer has two prices and two decisions.
2. The market is read
From the notification Apex has each competing offer’s landed price (item plus shipping), whether it is FBA, Prime, Amazon Retail, or featured (Buy Box eligible), its seller’s feedback count and percentage, the current Buy Box price and holder, and your own live price if your offer is in the list.
3. Competitors are filtered
Your strategy’s Competitor filters remove sellers you do not compete with: Amazon Retail, sellers that are not FBA, not Prime, or not featured, sellers under a feedback count or percentage, and any seller IDs you list under Ignore these sellers. What remains is “the market” for this decision. If nothing remains, the strategy’s no-competition rule applies.
4. The floor and ceiling are built
Apex computes two prices for the offer from four inputs:
| Input | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Cost | Your product’s Cost Price, or the vendor’s cost when a drop-ship vendor would ship the order (the strategy’s Cost source decides) |
| Shipping | Your Shipping Matrix band for the item’s weight, a per-offer shipping override, or Amazon’s FBA fulfillment fee on an FBA offer |
| Amazon fees | The referral rate and fixed fees Amazon estimates for the offer, refreshed automatically |
| Margin | The strategy’s Floor margin % and Ceiling margin % |
The arithmetic is a margin on the sale price, with the referral fee taken as a percentage of that price:
floor = (cost + shipping + fixed fees) / (1 - referral rate - floor margin)
ceiling = (cost + shipping + fixed fees) / (1 - referral rate - ceiling margin)
Then, per offer: MAP raises the floor to the product’s MAP price when the strategy enforces MAP; a hand-set Min price replaces the floor; a hand-set Max price replaces the ceiling. A Min price is never waived by anything.
If any input is missing, there is no floor and no decision. The offer is skipped and listed on the Status page with the reason. See Costs, Floors & Overrides.
5. The engine picks a target
Inside the band, the engine chooses:
- Rule-based. Beat or match the lowest price or the Buy Box by your undercut amount or percent. On the Buy Box modes, Raise price when winning lifts the price to just under the cheapest rival above you while you hold the box.
- Algorithmic Buy-Box. Undercut to win when you do not hold the box; climb by a small step toward the ceiling while you do; harvest to the ceiling or hold when there is no competition. The win-likelihood model can decline a chase it expects to lose.
Two situations get their own rule:
- The market is under your floor (nobody can be beaten at a legal price). The strategy’s unwinnable setting decides: hold the current price, harvest to the ceiling, or descend to the floor and sit as close to the market as the floor allows.
- The market is above your ceiling. By default the ceiling caps the price. With Follow the market on, the strategy prices against the market instead, as long as at least two other sellers are there (a lone offer is never followed). The setting’s name and the two-seller minimum are configurable: see Repricer Settings.
Every candidate price is then clamped to the band one more time. A price under the floor is raised to the floor, and a floor correction is never blocked by the pace guardrails below.
6. Pace guardrails
- Cooldown. The minimum minutes between two price changes on the same offer. A decision inside the cooldown waits.
- Max single-move %. Caps how far one change can move from the current price. Floor corrections are exempt.
7. Submit
Apex sends the consumer price (and, when business pricing is on, the business base and tiers in the same update) to Amazon. The Decisions table records the previous price, the new price, the cost floor, the margin at that price, and the reason in plain words.
8. Verify
Amazon accepting an update is not the same as the price being live. Apex reads the live offer back and compares. Matching prices verify; a mismatch is re-sent through a second route for a few rounds; a price that still will not land is parked and re-read later. A price Amazon keeps showing that Apex never sent raises a stuck-price notice after a set wait. See Price Verification & Health.
A worked example
A merchant-fulfilled power tool:
- Cost Price 100.00, weight band shipping 8.00, Amazon referral 15%, no fixed fee.
- Strategy: Floor margin 10%, Ceiling margin 40%, rule-based, Beat lowest price by $0.50, Exclude Amazon on.
Floor = (100 + 8) / (1 − 0.15 − 0.10) = 108 / 0.75 = 144.00. Ceiling = (100 + 8) / (1 − 0.15 − 0.40) = 108 / 0.45 = 240.00.
Now a notification arrives. Offers on the ASIN: Amazon Retail at 149.99, Seller A at 159.50, Seller B at 171.00. You are at 165.00.
- Exclude Amazon removes the 149.99 offer. The market is Seller A at 159.50 and Seller B at 171.00.
- Beat lowest by $0.50 targets 159.00.
- 159.00 is inside 144.00 to 240.00, so no clamp.
- Your last change was 40 minutes ago and the cooldown is 15 minutes; the move from 165.00 to 159.00 is 3.6%, under a 10% max single move. It goes.
- Apex submits 159.00, reads the live offer back, and the decision shows 165.00 → 159.00, floor 144.00, margin 17.1%, “beat lowest 159.50 by 0.50”. (At 159.00 the referral fee is 23.85, so 159.00 − 108.00 − 23.85 = 27.15 of margin, 17.1% of the sale price.)
Had Seller A been at 140.00, under the floor, the unwinnable rule would have decided: Hold keeps 165.00, Harvest to ceiling goes to 240.00, Descend to floor goes to 144.00. The decision reason says which rule fired.
What the Decisions table shows
Each row is one decision: the SKU and ASIN, the previous and desired price, the cost floor, the margin at the desired price, the reason, the verification status, and when. Filters narrow to Won, Held, Can’t win, business decisions and more. See Monitoring.
See also: Pricing Strategies · Costs, Floors & Overrides