Automated pricing in eCommerce: how to get rid of spreadsheets without losing control of your margins

In many eCommerce companies, changing prices still works the same way. The owner or managing director opens a huge Excel file, tweaks a few formulas, and sends the result to the team to upload to the eShop and the ERP.

With a few hundred items, that’s manageable. But a mid-sized company can easily have 50,000 products, and larger ones hundreds of thousands. Across all of them, you need prices that are lower in one market, different for B2B buyers, and discounted for a Christmas promotion. Try keeping track of that in spreadsheets.

When sales wants more than Excel can handle

Sales comes up with an idea: a promotion on an entire category. Or cheaper shipping for one specific customer segment.

In Excel, that means preparing the data by hand, uploading it to the eShop and the ERP, and checking that everything matches. Some scenarios can’t be done at all, such as recalculating shipping in bulk for one segment when that information isn’t in your spreadsheet. As a result, many companies simply give up on the promotion.

Every delay costs something. When a supplier raises prices and your selling price isn’t recalculated in time, you sell at a lower margin, or even below cost. And a late promotion costs you the revenue it was meant to bring in.

When one person holds all the prices

A typical example is “the boss.” The team handles incoming stock, fills in product attributes, and photographs products. But the boss keeps all the pricing in a single Excel spreadsheet. Every so often, he adjusts the formulas, gets new prices, and sends them out to be uploaded.

He doesn’t want to hand pricing over to anyone else. He’s afraid of losing control, and partly also of losing his key role in the company. That’s understandable. But the company pays for it:

• The team can’t make commercial decisions on its own. Every price change waits for approval from the top.
• Changes reach the website late. Sometimes it’s hours, sometimes days.
• Errors are found late. One wrong formula is all it takes for products to sell below purchase price.

From spreadsheets to rules

The answer isn’t hiring another person to fill in spreadsheets. It’s rules that calculate prices automatically.

The boss then doesn’t have to prepare every promotion himself. One instruction is enough: a 30% discount on refrigerators. Whoever is responsible for the category sets it up in the system for all products at once. Prices are recalculated and sent to the websites, and customers see them within a few minutes.

The work can be handed over because the system won’t let a price go outside the guardrails you’ve set. It also works with supplier costs and internal costs, and when anything changes, nobody forgets to recalculate prices. Management sets the strategy and the limits. The team handles day-to-day operations.

How WisePorter handles it

In WisePorter, pricing starts with costs. The system automatically calculates the real purchase price from supplier price lists, including currency conversion, shipping, storage, and volume bonuses. From the total cost, it then calculates selling prices using rules, separately for each sales channel and price level. After that, partner discounts, contractual bonuses, promotions, and clearance sales are applied on top.

What this means in practice:

• Margins are based on current costs. When a supplier raises prices, prices are recalculated across your entire portfolio, with no manual work.
• You set up a promotion once for a whole group of products. Prices are recalculated automatically and reach the website within minutes.
• You catch errors before your customers do. The system checks whether each price is correct: validated and not below cost. It flags unusual values or pulls the product from sale.
• Exceptions are still possible. A responsible person on the team can deliberately override the rules and offer individual terms. Without that, automation wouldn’t work in B2B.

Where AI makes sense

AI is already a common help with product data. It generates texts, translates into other languages, and adds product information that’s available on the web.

With prices, we’re more careful. If the boss hesitates to hand pricing over to his own team, he’s unlikely to hand it to AI without oversight. And he’s right: letting AI calculate prices without human review doesn’t seem realistic to us yet. But we’re exploring and prototyping scenarios where AI helps: monitoring competitor prices, recommending prices, or agents that watch the market and let you know when it’s time to react.

The condition is thorough review. Checking that a price is filled in isn’t enough. The system has to recognize when a price has changed by an order of magnitude overnight or when a margin has suddenly dropped by half. Cases like these need to be reviewed by a person.

Software is only part of the answer

A good tool matters, but it doesn’t guarantee success on its own. Processes carry just as much weight: how people need to work, which KPIs you want to move, and how much decision-making you’re willing to delegate. That’s why we usually start with new clients by analyzing their needs, not by delivering software.