Prices that move on their own
but never below cost
Manual price updates lag behind cost changes and competitor moves. 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.
Why a price drifts away from its own cost
Prices set manually drift from the costs underneath them. Updating a price is a task someone has to remember to do. Cost changes, a supplier increase, a currency shift, a shipping surcharge, do not announce themselves loudly enough to trigger that memory every time. When operators running catalogues of any real size finally audit it, they commonly find a meaningful share of SKUs priced below current cost for weeks or months. Nobody noticed, because the loss on any single order is small enough to stay invisible until it is added across hundreds of orders.
Competitive repricing has the opposite problem. Done manually, it is either too slow to matter, so 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. The same tool built to protect margin can end up destroying it, if a rule misfires during a traffic spike or a scraping error.
What the agent keeps enforcing, SKU by SKU
Applies your actual pricing rules continuously. Cost-plus, competitor-matched within a band, category-specific margin targets, whatever logic your team defines. It recalculates as often as the data changes, not on a manual schedule.
Enforces a hard margin floor at the system level. Not a soft warning but 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. It adjusts within the band you set, rather than chasing a race to the bottom. It flags when matching a competitor’s price would require breaching your own floor.
Factors in real-time cost changes. A supplier price increase, a currency shift, a shipping cost update. Each one feeds into the next price calculation, so a price reflects current reality, not a figure that was accurate when someone last updated it.
Alerts before a SKU breaches its margin floor, not after. That gives a human the chance to adjust a rule or accept a temporary loss leader deliberately, instead of discovering it after the fact.
Holds promotions and exceptions in a manual override queue. A deliberate loss-leader sale or a one-off discount code becomes a decision a person makes explicitly. It gets logged and time-bound, not left for the rule set to guess at.
What stays a business call, not a rule
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 that call and reviews it periodically. Any promotion, loss leader or deliberate below-normal pricing goes through the manual override queue. It is an explicit, time-bound decision, never something the rule set infers on its own.
How we keep the floor from ever slipping
A parallel-run period lets the agent calculate prices without pushing them live. 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 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. 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 only 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. The exact price depends on SKU count and how many competitor sources are monitored.
How long does it take to go live?
7 to 14 days. That covers encoding your actual pricing rules and margin floors per category, and connecting cost and competitor data sources. Then a parallel-run period lets the agent calculate 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 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. 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. 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. It 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.