Case Study: How Pricer24 Helps TI.ua Automate Product Repricing

Results

• Automated competitor and supplier price collection: Category managers no longer need to manually collect competitor and supplier prices — automation provides continuously updated data for faster, more confident repricing and promotional decisions.
• Significantly reduced repricing time: Previously, manually processing 100 products took about an hour; now, repricing several thousand products takes just 15 minutes.
• Faster market response: The company can quickly adapt to market changes — a critical factor in maintaining their competitive edge.

Customer Background

TI.ua is a Ukrainian online electronics and accessories retailer with a strong and steadily growing e-commerce presence. The company operates its own online store and is actively listed on the Hotline price comparison platform, reaching customers across the country.

Pricing Challenges

The company’s key categories include new and used Apple products, smartwatches, and accessories.

The main challenge with used devices is the impossibility of direct automatic price comparison with competitors. Unlike the new products market, where two iPhone 16 Pro Titanium 256GB units are identical, each used device is unique: they can differ significantly in battery health, body and screen condition, included accessories, and technical specifications.

Additionally, the lack of standardization in product names and descriptions across websites adds complexity. Competitors use their own grading systems: some label a device as “perfect,” others as “like new” or “ideal.” Some competitors don’t specify battery condition at all, or only provide general terms such as “standard condition.” Photos often don’t accurately reflect the device’s real condition, and technical specifications are frequently incomplete.

This lack of standardization makes price comparison and matching product pairs (client’s product vs competitor’s product) particularly challenging.

Different Supplier Price Formats

The second critical challenge was analyzing supplier price lists.
One supplier sends an Excel file by email, another updates prices in a Google Sheet, and a third shares prices via text messages in a Telegram channel.

Given the volumes of data that TI.ua deals with, consistency, accuracy, and speed in processing supplier prices are crucial. Decisions need to be made promptly, as competitors can purchase devices within just a few hours.

Previously, the client’s category managers had to:

• Process each supplier price list manually: download the file, locate the relevant products, copy price information into their own spreadsheet, convert prices to Ukrainian hryvnia (UAH) at the current exchange rate, and more.
• Spend hours on routine spreadsheet tasks. Analyzing all suppliers, comparing their prices to current market rates, calculating potential margins, and making purchasing or repricing decisions took far too much time.
• Deal with different data formats, which increased the risk of errors. When manually transferring prices from Telegram messages into spreadsheets, it was easy to miss a product, confuse models, or convert currencies incorrectly.

Repricing Process in Excel

Before implementing Pricer24, the repricing process looked like this:

The manager would visit websites of major competitors and manually analyze their prices, grouping products according to the company’s internal categories (e.g., “New Battery,” “Standard Battery”), which did not exist in the competitors’ site structures. This segmentation was necessary for accurate pricing, but it made the process even more complex. The manager had to manually find the equivalent model at each competitor and determine which internal category it belonged to in order to make a relevant comparison.

If the competitor’s price was better, the manager would then download supplier price lists, analyze them as described, consolidate all product information into a single working spreadsheet, and finally define the pricing strategy for that product.

Each pricing strategy had its own formula for calculating the updated selling price. After entering all necessary data for decision-making, the manager applied the formula to determine the updated price. This process required maximum concentration — a single mistake in a cell could result in incorrect pricing.

Once the new prices were calculated, they had to be approved by a senior manager. The senior manager also worked with the same spreadsheet, checking the pricing logic and the accuracy of calculations.

The spreadsheet itself was cumbersome to use. It stretched across many columns, including product code, SKU, product name with condition details, prices from several competitors, margin calculation columns, status fields, and more.

The wide spreadsheet layout forced constant horizontal scrolling. To make a pricing decision for a single product, the manager needed to view the product name (on the left), competitor prices (in the middle), and their own calculations and margins (on the right) simultaneously. However, the screen couldn’t fit all this information at once, so they had to scroll back and forth while keeping details in mind.

The drawbacks of this approach included a high amount of time spent on routine tasks, a constant risk of calculation errors, and delays in responding to market changes.

As TI.ua’s product assortment grew, updating prices manually became increasingly time-consuming, making it harder to maintain competitive online prices. The company needed a systematic repricing approach — a process of periodically reviewing and adjusting existing selling prices based on competitor pricing, supplier costs, and strategic considerations — that would reduce analysis time, minimize errors, and provide accurate data for strategic decision-making.

Client Objectives

• Automate price collection for comparable products from seven main competitors, taking into account the complexity of matching used devices.
• Organize data from 15 suppliers who provide price lists in various formats, from Excel files to text-based messages and other non-standard formats.
• Consolidate all necessary information into a single environment for faster repricing.
• Minimize the risk of errors associated with manually transferring data from multiple sources.
• Provide category managers with accurate data for strategic pricing and promotional decisions.
• Automate the product repricing process, embedding logic for managerial approval of prices proposed by managers.

How Pricer24 Helped TI.ua Automate Product Repricing

Project Kickoff: Technical Setup

To collect accurate and complete market data and present it in a format that was convenient for the client, we performed the following initial setup that included:

• Importing client price data via a feed integrated with the client’s internal enterprise management system
• Developing an algorithm to find competitor products according to the client’s specific categories, such as “smartphones with new battery” and “smartphones with standard battery.”
• Parsing product data from competitors’ websites.

Key point: Instead of searching for individual products by code or name in a competitor’s catalog, we collect data for the entire category at once.

This approach provides the client with several key benefits:

• Timeliness: Information about new products in competitors’ catalogs is updated daily.
• Completeness: By collecting entire categories from each site, we identify more matching products than if we searched product by product.
• Accuracy: Our approach ensures correct matching of product pairs (client’s product vs competitor’s product).

Outcome: The client receives comprehensive, high-quality data on all competitor prices in the market once per day.

Product Matching

The client chose to perform product matching independently. We enabled this functionality in the client’s Pricer24 account and provided training on how to match products in the system.

Once parsers automatically collect data from competitors’ websites, products enter the system. The client’s manager then goes to the Dictionary module within their Pricer24 account and matches new competitor products with products in their own catalog. The system suggests possible matches (which client product corresponds to which competitor product), saving significant time, as the manager can quickly select the correct one.

This approach ensures high speed and accuracy in product matching, as managers understand the naming conventions and structure of their own catalog, allowing them to quickly find corresponding competitor products.

After matching, the competitor’s price automatically appears in the Repricing module (described below).

The initial matching of approximately 4,000 products took several days of work by the client’s responsible employee. Today, maintaining up-to-date data — that is, matching new products on competitors’ sites — requires only 1–2 hours of an employee’s time per week.

Repricing Module: The Key Solution

We customized the automatic repricing module (Dynamic Pricing) in Pricer24 to simplify and speed up the process of setting new prices for the client’s products.

1. Each product has its current price and a price calculated by the system based on competitor prices and client-defined rules. Category managers can also enter a manual price, which must then be approved by the head of category management before it goes live.
2. The system performs repricing according to rules, giving priority to the manual price if one is provided. If no manual price is entered, all prices are recalculated according to the general rules.
3. Calculation takes only a few seconds. Updated prices can be exported from the system and manually updated on the website. Or, if desired, automatic price updates on the site can be configured.

Details

Instead of a massive spreadsheet, managers now have a single view with compact data. To view all pricing information for a specific product, they simply double-click on the cell with the product’s name. A side panel then opens showing:

• Current client price
• Stock price (purchase price of already acquired units)
• Pre-order price (planned purchase price)
• Competitor prices

Visual Cues

• If a competitor’s price is lower, it’s highlighted in red.
• If the client has the lowest price on the market, it’s highlighted in green.

Automatic Conversion

Sale prices are displayed in UAH, while purchase prices are shown in USD, converted according to the exchange rate set by the client for margin calculation.

Automatic Margin Calculation

The system automatically calculates margins in USD and as a percentage:

• Based on the current price
• Based on the proposed new price (as suggested by the category manager)
• Based on the final new price (as approved by the head of the category department)

How Automatic Repricing Works

Step 1: New Price Proposed by Category Manager

The manager enters a proposed repricing, and the system immediately calculates the new margin.

Step 2: Approval of Proposed Prices by Head of Category Management

The head of category management filters items to see only those for which category managers have suggested a new price.

The suggested prices are reviewed, approved, or adjusted by the head of category management, and the final repricing reflects all changes.

Analysis, communication, and decision-making all take place within a single convenient interface. Category managers analyze supplier and competitor price data collected by the system and propose new prices, and the head of category management reviews these proposals and makes adjustments if necessary.

Customized Solutions for TI.ua

It was important for TI.ua to receive several non-standard, business-specific solutions — and the Pricer24 team implemented all of these requests within the platform.

• Manual Supplier Price Entry: Since supplier price sources constantly change, we allowed the client to enter prices manually into the system.
• Three Separate Prices for One Specific Competitor: For one competitor, we implemented price collection for models with new batteries, standard batteries, and without specified battery information.
• Flexible Pricing Formulas: Managers can apply different formulas during repricing — after selecting a strategy for a product with just two clicks from a dropdown, the system automatically applies the corresponding formula.
• Approval Functionality for Senior Managers: We implemented a price approval workflow at the management level.

Category-Specific Approach: The system was adapted to the specifics of different product categories.