A box of fixings for the price of one
On Monday morning a supplier uploads their new price file. Overnight, a column shifted in their export, and every product in one range now shows the price per unit where it used to show the price per box of two hundred. By lunchtime, buyers have ordered hundreds of boxes at a fraction of their real price. The supplier asks you to cancel the orders. The buyers, who ordered in good faith, are annoyed. Some had already told their own customers.
The week before, another supplier's decimal point moved the other way, and a popular product sat at ten times its price for three days. Nobody bought it, and nobody noticed.
Why price errors go live unchecked
Suppliers update prices often, especially in trade categories where costs move, and most do it with a spreadsheet exported from their own system. Exports break, columns move, units change, and people make typing errors. Most marketplace platforms accept whatever arrives, because checking every price by hand is impossible at scale.
Errors in both directions matter. Prices that are too low cause orders nobody can honour. Prices that are too high quietly kill sales, and the supplier only notices when revenue drops.
| Error type | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Decimal slip | Price ten or a hundred times too high or low |
| Unit confusion | Price per unit entered as per pack, or the reverse |
| Column shift | Prices assigned to the wrong products |
| Currency or VAT mix-up | Prices including VAT where excluding expected |
| Placeholder prices | Zero or 9999 left in the file |
What price errors cost
Too-low prices lead to cancelled orders, unhappy buyers and a question your terms must answer about whether pricing errors can be cancelled; your advisers can explain where you stand. Too-high prices lose sales silently. Both damage trust in the marketplace's pricing. And investigating after the fact, working out which orders were affected and contacting buyers, takes a lot of time.
The price change check we build
- Change comparison: every incoming price is compared with the product's previous price, and changes beyond thresholds you set, by category, are marked for checking.
- Peer comparison: prices are compared with the same product from other suppliers, where grouped, and with similar products in the category, to catch prices that are out of line even without a history.
- Pattern detection: many changes by the same factor in one file, such as everything divided by two hundred, are recognised as likely unit or column errors and the whole batch is held.
- Supplier confirmation: held changes are sent back to the supplier with the old and new price side by side to confirm or correct, and confirmed changes go live straight away.
- Safe publishing: unchanged or small changes publish immediately, so normal updates are not slowed down.
- Change log: every price change is recorded with the time, the source file and who confirmed it, which helps with any buyer queries or disputes.
Price updates after the check
Suppliers keep uploading as normal. Most changes go live immediately. The odd mistake is caught before a buyer sees it, and the supplier confirms or fixes it in a minute. Your team no longer finds out about price errors from a flood of orders or a supplier complaint about falling sales.
Are price errors reaching your buyers?
- Buyers have ordered at prices that turned out to be mistakes.
- Supplier price files go live without any checks.
- Unit and pack price mix-ups have happened.
- You have found products priced far above the market by accident.
- Nobody keeps a record of when each price changed.