Setting prices when you’re competing with other sellers can seem simple. You can lower your price to be more competitive, raise it to preserve your profit margin or leave it alone at your preferred selling price.
But what about when you don’t have any competition? What do you do when…
- Selling your own branded or private label products?
- Creating hard-to-replicate product bundles?
- Your competition has sold out and you’re the only seller left?
Time to Experiment
Setting a price when you don’t have any competition depends on many factors. The biggest is whether or not you expect competition in the future.
If you’re making your own branded products or selling bundled products, you may not ever have any competition! That’s a great situation to be in.
In this situation you need to consider your stock situation. Do you have a never-ending supply of products? Or are you limited in the number of bundles you can create?
If you’re constrained by limits to your stock, you need to maximize the total value of that stock. You don’t want to sell your last 10 items for $10 each, when you could’ve sold them just as fast at $13 each.
Time to Capitalize
 If you believe that your time with no competition is limited, you need to strike while the iron is hot.
Don’t raise prices too much, or you risk missing sales during your best opportunity to make them. At the same time, if you’re the only seller on a popular item, there may be no price that is too high.
Our recommendation is to start by pricing lower than you normally would. As you make sales, try to raise prices until the sales velocity decreases. Sales velocity is the rate of sales you make in a given time period.
If your sales velocity decreases, lower prices until it picks up, then begin raising it again.
Rather than just setting a high price or a low price, adjusting your price in this way will help you to maximize your overall profits.
List Price & Unit Session Percentage
How often are you looking at the business reports provided by Amazon? To improve your sales when you have no competition, look at the Unit Session Percentage report.
Unit Session Percentage (USP) is the number of units sold relative to the number of customers who viewed the products. If you have a low USP, then customers are looking at the item, they just aren’t buying it. The first adjustment to make is to lower your price. Alternatively, if your USP is high, then try increasing prices.
List Price is available on most items in the Amazon catalog. It’s also known as the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). If you don’t have any competition, then use the MSRP as a pricing guideline.