Amazon’s Sale Price vs. Your Price: Why Are They Different?

Pricing plays a significant role in any seller’s overall Amazon strategy, as you want to be optimally priced to drive consumers to purchase. In order to maintain market share and avoid losing sales to your competitors, you need to understand how to effectively and dynamically price your catalog to yield the highest performance results. In this article, we break down the difference between Amazon’s “sale price” and “your price” terminology.

On Amazon, “your price” is the normal price you want to list your product for. The sale price, on the other hand, is the price you use when running a sale on that item. For example, if you normally sell a product for $39.99, that is “your price.” Originally, when you wanted to put an item on sale for a week, you would populate the “sale price” and enter the start and end date of the sale. You would then see “your price” crossed out and “sale price” next to the new price with the percentage savings. 

Before:

In an attempt to clarify the nuances of Amazon sale price versus your price, Amazon simplified product detail pages in October 2017 so they show the lowest offer price and a list price if you choose to provide one. Now, prices formerly described as “sale prices” are displayed as “prices.” More often than not, sellers are not including list prices, so only one final price is displayed to shoppers.

After:

If you use the sale price, there will no longer be a separate field or display for pre-discounted prices after the change occurs. To include a list price, you must review Amazon’s Policy on Reference Prices and complete the “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP)” field in Seller Central or in the inventory upload file. List prices need to represent the price at which sellers or other retailers have recently made substantial sales of the product in question and you are responsible for making sure that list prices provided to Amazon remain current.

Now, if you want to give consumers a percentage off, you run a promotion. Here, you can establish a promotion with a tiered discount structure to encourage the customer to buy more because they get a greater discount. You can also discount single unit purchases through a limited-time sale price.