Pricing Analyzer

The Pricing Analyzer (Admin → Tool Box → Pricing Analyzer) studies your store's own sales history and recommends price updates, item by item. It is a report only — it never changes a price. You review the recommendations and make any changes yourself, so nothing moves without your say-so.

What it looks at

The analyzer finds every time your store changed an item's price in the past several years and measures what happened to that item's sales afterward, compared against the rest of its department in the same months. That comparison cancels out weather, seasonality, and store-wide traffic trends, so the result reflects how customers responded to the price itself. Items whose history shows customers did buy less after an increase are automatically held back from recommendations.

How recommendations are built

Every item is classified into one of three sensitivity tiers:

• KVI (known-value items) — products your customers can easily price-compare elsewhere, like bagged soil and branded fertilizer. These carry a small, hard cap so your store's price image stays protected.
• Semi — common plants in common sizes. Moderate cap.
• Blind — specialty items that are hard to comparison-shop. Largest cap.

Proposed prices always land on your store's own price points — the analyzer learns your catalog's conventions (for example, prices ending in .99, or the $X4.99/$X9.99 pattern) and never invents an odd-looking price. Increases that would cross a round-dollar threshold (like $39.99 to $40.99) are held unless the move is worth making deliberately.

Margins are computed against each item's most recently received cost from your purchase orders, not a long-run average — so the report shows where costs have crept up since the last time the price moved. Items whose last received cost is more than a year old are flagged so you can double-check them first.

Reading the report

The scenario table at the top compares three cap levels (Conservative, Base, Aggressive) and shows the projected annual profit for each under different assumptions about customer response — including the break-even point where a scenario would stop being worth it. The table below it lists each proposed move with the current price, proposed price, margins before and after, and the projected annual value. A separate list shows items held for a manual decision, with the reason for each.

Use the recompute now link to refresh the analysis after major price or cost changes; results are otherwise cached for a day.

Enabling it

The Pricing Analyzer is enabled per store. If you don't see it in your Tool Box and would like it turned on, contact VMX support.