With more than 60% of Amazon’s sales coming from independent sellers, you can bet that competition for the Buy Box is fierce. Winning it is the result of a combination of factors, not a single one of which is luck. Third-party Amazon sellers in the US move 13,445 items every minute, so there’s no way it’s humanly possible for them to research and reprice all their items every day to stay competitive. Sellers know this, which is why—unless you’re selling your own creations or trademarked items—it’s practically an imperative to use repricing software for your own Amazon store.
Of course, sellers know that, too. The reality of this situation is that competition for the Buy Box often boils down to a vast competition between repricers. If you’re in the market for one, it’s important to know that all repricers aren’t created equal. Two of the most popular repricers on the market—SmartRepricer and Aura—seem to be a feature-for-feature match, making it difficult to choose one over the other. But if you take a closer look at both, a clear winner emerges.
A Closer Look at SmartRepricer vs. Aura
Both SmartRepricer and Aura can lay claim to being two of the most effective repricers available, and both are telling the truth. Both are highly rated by their customers. Both make use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to gather intel about a seller’s competitors and adjust prices accordingly. They have predefined strategy and workflow templates, but also offer the ability to customize your own. With all things being equal, which is the best choice?
The good news here is that all things aren’t exactly equal. Let’s go down the list of the biggest differences between these two solutions to see which comes out on top.
Price
Neither of these solutions will break the bank; they’re both priced well within the budget of even the smallest seller—especially when you consider that their reason for existence is to increase revenue and profit. You’ve got to spend money to make money. On a pure dollar-for-dollar basis, Aura is the more expensive of the two:
- SmartRepricer plans range from $49/mo at the low end to $299/mo at the top.
- Aura, on the other hand, starts out $97/mo and tops out at $397/mo.
Of course, these prices don’t exist in a vacuum—the less expensive option isn’t necessarily the better choice. The value is found in what you get for that price, so we can’t declare a winner here based on price alone. What we can say is that SmartRepricer offers six different levels of subscription versus Aura’s three.
We should note that Aura also offers an “Early Stage” plan for new sellers, but there’s an application process to see if you qualify. It’s not a standard offering and isn’t designed as a long-term solution, so we’re not taking that into consideration.
Offering twice the number of subscription tiers makes SmartRepricer the more flexible/accommodating of the two. In general, stepping up one level with SMR gets you where you need to be. If you upgrade one tier with Aura, you may find yourself paying for more than you need.
Winner: SmartRepricer
Amazon Marketplace Availability
Amazon has 22 different geographical marketplaces across the world. The more of them you can list your items in, the more customers you have a chance of reaching—that’s just common sense. Both SmartReprcier and Aura offer their users the ability to sell in any of those regions, but only one of them lets you sell in nearly all of them at once.
Amazon recently launched a new marketplace in South Africa, which SmartRepricer doesn’t yet connect to, but all the other ones are fair game. You can have all 21 other marketplaces connected at once with no problem.
At its highest level of service, Aura will reprice items in up to 5 marketplaces, hard stop. Though they support most marketplaces, they impose a restriction on how many you can connect to at once.
Winner: SmartRepricer
Number of Listings
It’s very common for repricers to limit the number of listings you can work with, and that makes sense. More listings equals more usage of the solution’s algorithm (and the compute power required to process it all). It’s understandable, then, that SmartRepricer limits users to 5,000 listings at the low end and 150,000 at the upper levels of service.
But those limits also pale in comparison to Aura’s unlimited-across-the-board offerings. All their plans allow for any number of listings which, if nothing else, removes the worry of going over a threshold and it costing more money. This is especially important for Amazon sellers doing online arbitrage without focusing on any niche.
Winner: Aura
Revenue Limits
Aura giveth, and Aura taketh away. Unlimited listings are countered by the cap they impose on revenue for each of their subscription tiers. Sure, it’s easier—or more enjoyable, anyway—to monitor your revenue than total number of listings, but the whole point of a repricer is to maximize your earnings. At the low end of Aura’s subscriptions, you’re capped at $50K monthly revenue. If you’re over that, you’ll need to go up one level of service, even if you don’t need anything that it offers. At least the revenue limit is based on a trailing two months, so you won’t be caught off guard.
SmartRepricer limits you on the number of listings, but you can make as much revenue off them as you can without penalty.
Winner: SmartRepricer
Workflows
Both SmartRepricer and Aura offer their users customizable workflows to more finely manage each listing. The workflows kick into action based on triggers—they could be time-and-date based or even set off by other actions. But they’re designed to be a set of rules that run automatically and define how to reprice your listings. Both apps have easy-to-use interfaces to create and customize rules, and Aura goes as far as providing templates to make things even easier. Workflows are at the heart of the automation, and both platforms excel over their competitors when it comes to their implementations of the feature. They are both truly “set it and forget it” systems.
Because of this, we can’t say that one does it better than the other. But we can point out that this is another way SmartRepricer’s is a better value: there is no limit on the number of workflows you can define and deploy. With Aura, the most you can create is 10 of them, at the highest subscription level.
Winner: SmartRepricer
Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
In 2023, Aura announced updates to its software to include Maven, an AI-based repricing engine that its users can implement in place of one of the other strategy templates offered. The feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. But some customers who are happy with the tech itself end up growing frustrated with Aura’s limits on AI-powered repricing. Like workflows, marketplaces, and sales revenue, Aura treats this like a premium feature that you can only use on a limited number of listings. In its bottom-tier Essentials plan, Aura sets the limit to 250 listings, while the top-level Pro plan caps it at 10K.
SmartRepricer was built on AI: it’s an integral part of the platform. When you’re picking a repricing strategy, you don’t have to choose between a specific template with a goal or the AI. You get both, without limits.
Winner: SmartRepricer
Repricing Frequency
Both SmartRepricer and Aura say they offer real-time repricing, but it’s important to understand what that means. The actual act of changing the price on a listing does happen in real time; the repricer sends the new price, Amazon updates accordingly. But there are limits on how often you can do this, imposed by Amazon itself. They’ve set it so you can’t update a listing any more frequently than every two minutes.
Aura sticks to this two-minute rule, so that repricing happens as quickly as Amazon allows. SmartRepricer, for its part, sticks to an every-five-minutes schedule. While much faster than the 15-minute intervals that are common among competitors (including Amazon’s own repricing tool), it’s still more than twice as long as what Aura’s doing.
Aura also goes a step further with its Hyperdrive feature, which uses “clever engineering” (their words) to get around the two-minute limit imposed by Amazon. With Hyperdrive, item prices can update every 10 seconds, giving a competitive advantage. Like most of Aura’s features, this one has a maximum to how much you can use it. Depending on the plan you’re on, you can use Hyperdrive on anywhere from 10 to 50 listings—but this can still make an impact on your most competitive items.
Winner: Aura
Integrations
Both apps have a select number of integrations, mainly around inventory management, to help you get more out of them. Both integrate with InventoryLab, while SmartRepricer also connects with SellerRunning and Aura supports RestockPro and ScanPower.
Connecting with any of these apps gives your repricer the information it needs to know about what you’ve got sitting on the warehouse shelves, what’s on its way out of the warehouse, and what’s on its way in. For all of these, it provides the repricer with item cost information as well, ensuring you get the most accurate pricing to reflect your profit goals.
While Aura may have one more integration than SmartRepricer, they’re both integrating with the best inventory solution in the market: InventoryLab. When Aura announced the integration back in 2019, they did so by declaring that “It just got real.” Aura’s users were no doubt excited by this, as it automates the syncing of cost data once every 24 hours so that Aura’s algorithm can price listings accordingly.
That’s a win for Aura users, but would be a step back for SmartRepricer’s customers, who can integrate with InventoryLab and sync cost data every 90 seconds—much much faster than once a day. When you enter a shipment into IL, the inbound items’ cost is part of the official inventory of your Amazon store. SmartRepricer can factor in those costs before the items even hit the warehouse. Aura can’t rely on that data ’til the next day, after the sync has occurred. This means that SmartRepricer is always relying on much more recent data for its price optimization decisions, a major competitive edge.
Winner: SmartRepricer
Conclusion
Both SmartRepricer and Aura are powerful tools that can help you win the Buy Box on Amazon. They both leverage AI and machine learning to automate repricing strategies and offer customization options. However, when we weigh their strengths and weaknesses, a clear winner emerges.
SmartRepricer shines in terms of value and affordability. It offers more subscription tiers, unlimited marketplaces, no revenue limits, and unlimited workflows at a lower price point. Additionally, it integrates with InventoryLab for near real-time cost data syncing, giving it a significant edge in price optimization.
Aura takes the lead in repricing frequency with its Hyperdrive feature, which can potentially update prices every 10 seconds. And they offer repricing for unlimited listings across all levels of subscription. Still, for however good their features (and implementations of those features) are, there are still too many limits imposed on users, capping access to things that SmartRepricer doesn’t restrict at all. Because of this, SmartRepricer's feature set provides more consistent value for a wider range of sellers and is the clear winner between the two.
Are you ready to get the upper hand in the battle for the Buy Box? Register for a free trial today to see just how smart our repricer is.
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