PriceYak Features and Glossary of Terms

We know PriceYak can seem a bit complicated at first glance.  Let's take a look at some of our features and common terms. 

Setup

Add Store: To start using PriceYak, you need to link a store where you plan on listing your items! You can add as many stores as you want, and these can include eBay stores for Canada, the US, and the UK or Shopify.
Destination Market: To add a store, we need to know what site your store lives on.

Store Settings Page

Repricing Settings
PriceYak provides smart ways of helping you stay on top of item price changes to minimize your losses and maximize your profits. We watch your source items like a hawk and can automatically reprice your listings for you when we see a price change. Your life will no longer be at the mercy of unpredictable price swings. You can also customize the formulas we use to calculate your new prices.

Quantity In Stock: When a listing is in stock on the market, PriceYak will set the quantity in your store to the number you set here.
Margin Min: PriceYak will reprice listings to ensure that you receive at least this much in profit for each sale.
Range Repricer (Click article for full detail): PriceYak allows you to specify different profit margins for different price ranges. For each range of source prices, PriceYak will reprice your listings so the profit you receive for each sale will equal margin_percent * source price + margin_fixed.

• Min price: The start of the range of source prices for which you want to apply fixed or percentage margin rules
• Margin percent: The percentage of the source item you want to make in profit after fees
• Margin fixed: The fixed amount you want to make in profit after fees
• Advanced Settings:
• Round up prices to end in $0.XX: Many users choose to round all prices up to 0.99 because they subscribe to the belief that buyers are more attracted to prices that end in 99 cents. Other users like having clean-looking prices that always end in .00! This setting allows you to customize that.
  
• Include 0.40 AO fee: By asking PriceYak to add the 40 cent Auto-Ordering fee into your listing prices, you can make it so that your buyers pay for the cost of PriceYak Auto-Ordering an item for you. Yippee!
• Fixed PayPal fee: By default, PayPal charges you about $0.30 per order, but you might have negotiated a better rate with PayPal. This setting allows you to make sure PriceYak knows what you're really paying PayPal in fixed fees, so that your repricing calculations are accurate.
• Percentage PayPal fee: By default, PayPal charges you about 2.9% per order, but you might have negotiated a better rate with PayPal. This setting allows you to make sure PriceYak knows what you're really paying PayPal in percentage, so that your repricing calculations are accurate.
• Percentage eBay FVF fee: By default, eBay charges you about 10% of the final value of any item you sell, but you might have negotiated a better rate with them, or be a high volume seller with better perks. This setting allows you to make sure PriceYak knows what you're really paying eBay for every sale, so that your repricing calculations are accurate.
• Lower quantity to match source market: If the market reports a lower quantity in stock than your "Quantity in Stock" value and you check this option, we will use the lower quantity reported by the marketplace.

Auto-ordering Settings
Gone are the days of painstakingly placing every order by hand. PriceYak can automate this for you so you can use your valuable time doing less mind-numbing things.

• Edit Ordering Accounts: We need to know how to place orders on your behalf! Please add your fulfillment accounts here so we can take all the grunt work off your hands.
• Gift Message: When possible, orders on PriceYak are placed as gift orders unless you specify otherwise. Most sellers don't want receipts or personal information sent to their buyers.
• Minimum Profit: We will not ship an order unless the profit is calculated to be greater than this amount. Sometimes users like to put a negative number here because it's better for eBay accounts to ship orders even when it means they lose a small amount of money. Stores with lower cancellation rates have better ratings. You can leave this blank to use our default max_price formula.
• Enable bundling: This is an experimental feature that allows you to sell "Add-On" items on Amazon, as well as take advantage of free shipping offers from Amazon when you buy a certain amount ($50 or£20) of items using Amazon's "ship to multiple addresses" feature. Only works with Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk currently.
• Mark shipped as soon as order placed: PriceYak usually marks an item as shipped once Amazon uploads a tracking number, but checking this box will mark it as shipped as soon as PriceYak places the order for the item. This is all personal preference, as eBay still calculates seller stats from when tracking numbers are uploaded, and not when the item is marked as ship. 
• Do not mark orders as gifts: Some users think gift receipts are weird, and don't want PriceYak to place orders as gifts. This is also useful for UK users who care about VAT. 
• Force OOS on max_quantity_exceeded error: Sometimes, Amazon only lets you buy a certain number of the same item per week. If you hit this limit with an item, we'll get a "max_quantity_exceeded" error and we won't be able to order the item for you. If you check this box, we can put the item out of stock for you for a week when this happens, to allow your limit to reset so that you're able to buy the item again.

Listing Settings

Additional Title Keywords: This is how you can add things like "Brand New!" or "Free Shipping" to all of your listing titles. You have about 80 characters to work with on eBay, and PriceYak will actually make a small attempt to make it so that we don't cut your original title off in too ugly of a way, so that these title keywords will fit.
Allow Cross Store Duplicates: If checked, you will not be prevented from listing items that you already have listed in your other eBay stores. eBay hates duplicate listings though, so they might take action against you if they catch you doing this.

Offer Selection Settings
This is where you tell PriceYak what items you're willing to buy and sell, and what criteria the items have to meet in order for them to be good enough for your store!

AMAZON SETTINGS

• Maximum Handling Days: This is how you can filter out offers that ship too slowly. For example, if a seller takes 3-4 days to ship their items, you can make sure that PriceYak doesn't order from that seller by setting your max handling days to 2. For Prime users, we recommend setting maximum handling days to 0 to source the most reliable products. If PriceYak can't find any offers that meet your standards, we'll tell you that we can't find anything to send to your buyer.
• Shipping Method: This is how PriceYak chooses offers that best matches your shipping preferences.
• cheapest: This will always select the least expensive shipping option, starting with the fastest free option. Even if there is no free shipping, it will still place the order.
• free: This will ship the fastest possible option for free and it will fail if there are no free options.
• no_rush: This will look for the no_rush shipping option and if it's not there, it will fail.
• free_standard: This will ship the item for free, but use the free standard shipping to do it. It will fail if the shipping is not free.
• fastest: This will always select the fastest shipping option, independent of the price.
• Checkbox Options:
• Allow offers sold by Amazon: You can't change this. This is just for record-keeping.
• Allow third party FBA offers: Checking this means that you're willing to sell items sold by non-Amazon people through Amazon's "Fulfilled by Amazon" program. We're talking about the offers that you see when you go to a main listing on Amazon and click that small link to look at who else is selling the item on Amazon.
• Allow third party merchant-fulfilled offers (not recommended): Checking this means that you're willing to sell items sold by non-Amazon people, and which are not fulfilled by Amazon.
• Allow "Prime Only" offers: There are some items on Amazon that only 
• Allow "Add-on" offers

Create Listings

Product IDs 
Every item and variation of an item has unique product identifier, and you use this to tell PriceYak exactly what item you want to list. If the item has variations (different sizes, colors, etc.) you need make sure you select a variation in order to see the product ID for it. You can use the YakPal Chrome extension to quickly grab a bunch of these IDs all at once.

• Amazon: This is the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) of the item. It is a 10-digit alphanumeric identifier for a product, and you can find it in the URL for any item on Amazon, or 
• WalMart: This is an 8-digit group of numbers in the URL of the item. 
• AliExpress: The product ID for AliExpress items are a little harder to find. You have to click on the item, click on the variation, then use YakPal to "Identify Product Variant." 

List vs. Review and List
Which button should you click after you've entered your product IDs?

• List: Click this to list all products you've entered directly to your store. You can always decide to make product detail changes directly to your eBay listings later. 
• Review and List: Click this to give yourself a chance to review each of the listings and make small detail changes before you publish the listings. 

Listing Requests
This is where you can see all of the batches of listings that you've created. If any of the listings fail, this is where you can find out why the failure occurred, make corrections, and try again.

• Common listing errors:
• No offers were found which meet seller selection criteria: Remember the "Offer Selection Settings" section where you told PriceYak what handling times, shipping speeds, and product sources you would deem acceptable for your store? PriceYak couldn't find an source for the product you tried to list that met these requirements, so it couldn't list anything.
• An internal error occurred and the listing timed out - please retry later: Something weird happened- a "retry" a few hours later usually fixes this.
• This listing is a duplicate of an existing listing: When you're listing thousands of products, it's easy to lose track of what items you've already listed. Also, eBay hates it when users create duplicate listings and they'll penalize your account if they catch you listing duplicates. So, PriceYak will detect duplicate listings for you and not list them. This error also usually comes with a link you can click on to show you the listing you already have for the item.

Listing Settings
There are so many ways to customize the listings that PriceYak creates for you!

• General Settings: These are the same settings you see on your store settings page.
• Edit Lister Template: We offer a few preset options for the look of your templates. Here's a Tutorial Video on how to customize those presets. Alternatively, if you know your way around a bit of code, you can enter your own custom template here.
• Edit Listing Blacklists: You can add brands, keywords, and products to "blacklists" to prevent PriceYak from creating certain listings. Make sure to remember to click "Save Blacklists" at the bottom when you're done editing these!:
• Brand Blacklist: Over time, PriceYak has crowdsourced a list of brands that are known Vero (verified rights owner) risks on eBay. If you list an item under this brand and you are not an authorized seller, the rights owner might try to bust you on eBay, and eBay will apply penalties to your account. If you try to list a brand on this list, PriceYak will automatically fail the listing attempt. You can still list these anyway, but you'll have to remove the brand from your personal blacklist (which we've prepopulated for you with lots of brands) first. You can also use "review and list" to force the listing through.
• Keyword Blacklist: PriceYak will refuse to list any listing with a title containing any of these keywords
• ASIN/Product ID Blacklist: PriceYak will refuse to list any listing with these ASIN/Product IDs. 

Current Listings

Filters: You can make it easier to find listings by choosing to display "All Listings," "Listings with overrides" (listings for which you've changed and customized certain settings), or listings from only certain sources. You can export a CSV/spreadsheet of all of your listings too!

Settings
There is a button called "Settings" to the right of each individual listing for viewing and editing that listing. On the Settings page for listings, you can see recent revisions that PriceYak has made to the item, as well as details on the orders that have been made for your listing. We'll go through the items you see in this page line-by-line!

• eBay id: Click this to be taken to the listing that PriceYak has created for this item
• Amazon/Walmart/AliExpress id: Click this to be taken to the original listing of the source of the item
• Quantity: This is how many of the item that you have listed as available on your listing
• Price: The current price of the listing in your store
• Active on eBay US: This indicates whether the listing is currently live on eBay, or deactivated
• Marketplace Listing Fees: The marketplaces where you keep your stores charge fees of their own that you might want to take into consideration. On PriceYak, the estimates for Marketplace Listing Fees are computed by a very simple multiplication: $0.05/month * number of months listed.
• Gross Profit: This is the lifetime profit of all orders for this listing minus the lifetime costs of this listing. Full detail on this feature and how it is calculated here.
• Source Market and Product ID: This is editable in case your original source runs out of inventory for your item, and you are able to find it elsewhere. You can tell PriceYak to order it from another site by updating the Source Market and that market's corresponding product ID for the item. This makes it so that you don't have to recreate the listing from scratch and lose your hard-earned SEO when you need to switch source websites.
• Checkboxes:
• Disable ordering for this listing: Prevents PriceYak from automatically ordering this item after sales
• Disable repricing for this listing: Prevents PriceYak from making changes to price AND quantity for this listing
• Do not modify price for this listing: Prevents PriceYak from making changes to price on this listing, but quantities for the item will still be updated
• Do not modify quantity for this listing: Prevents PriceYak from updating the quantity/availability of this listing
• In-Stock Quantity Override: You set a "Quantity in Stock" for all of your listings on your Store Settings page, but you can also override the quantity for specific listings with this feature. If the product is out of stock (OOS) on the source market however, PriceYak will still put your item out of stock no matter what number you have entered in the override. 
• Margin percent override: You set a "Margin percent" for all of your listings on your Store Settings page, but you can override this for specific items with this feature.
• Notes: For personal use, put whatever you want in here if it helps you keep track of what you're doing!

Revisions
PriceYak allows you to keep track of every price and quantity change that is made to your listing, as well as the rationale behind the changes. PriceYak checks each of your listings for updates about every hour, and will only post a "revision" if there is something new (quantity or price) to report. 

• Source Product: The source listing that the repricer is basing its changes on
• eBay/Shopify listing: Links to your listing
• Selected Offer Seller: The seller of the offer that PriceYak will try to buy from if your listing sells
• Old Price: What the price of your listing used to be
• New Price: The new price that PriceYak set for your listing, based on price changes at the source
• Old Quantity: The last quantity that PriceYak thinks was available on your listing, according to the last time it was updated or checked somewhere between revisions. If you or another software makes a manual quantity change to the eBay listing, it may take an hour for PriceYak to notice that change.
• New Quantity: The new quantity that PriceYak set for your listing

Orders

View All Orders
This is where you go to look at all the items that you've sold! You can check on whether PriceYak was able to successfully place the order for you, and you can make changes and retry the order if it fails. 

Stuff at the top of this page:

• Retry orders using: If you have provided PriceYak with multiple accounts to place orders from, you can retry failed orders with a different account. This might be helpful if the order failed because there was a problem with the account we initially tried to place it from. The account that an order is placed with is chosen randomly by PriceYak.
• Manage AO accounts: If you've changed passwords or billing information, if you want to tell PriceYak to pay with the gift balance on an account, or if you want to temporarily disable the use of an account, this is where you go to make these settings.
• Sources: This is a filter that shows you orders from only certain sources
• Date Filter: This will only show you orders from a certain date range.
• Orders for tagged listings: 
• Export CSV: Export your listings into an Excel sheet. This is probably handy for your personal records! 

Quick details shown for each order in "View All Orders"

• Destination Market Order Time: What time your buyer placed the order on your listing
• Destination Market Transaction ID: This is an ID that helps PriceYak identify the sale. You can click on it to be taken to the original order details page of the website that your shop is on.
• Destination Market Listing: Click on this to see your listing for the item
• Destination Market Qty: This is the quantity of the item that was available on your listing at the time of purchase
  
• Destination Market Price: The price of your item when your buyer made the purchase
• Destination Market Paid: How much the buyer paid you for the item
• Source Market Listing: Click on this to see the original listing that your listing was based on
• Source Market Account: The account that PriceYak used to place the order 
• Source Market Total: The amount that you paid for the item
• Source Market Tracking: PriceYak will upload tracking information for the order as soon as we receive it!
• Status: If the order failed or is pending, this is where PriceYak gives you the quick and dirty explanation of why it happened.
• Profit: This is a beta feature that gives you a rough estimate of the profit you made on the order. More detail on how this is currently calculated here.
• Actions: Will provide you a handy button to quickly retry the order if it fails
• Details: Click here to see even more information about the order
• Notes: You can leave love notes to yourself to help keep track of things. The green checkmark means that your latest notes have been automatically saved.

Advanced details for orders
From the "View All Orders" page, click on the small "View" button next to any order that you want to know more about. This is where you'll find the buyer's username, the buyer's shipping address, screenshots of what PriceYak has done or tried to do for the order, a log of "retries" for the order, and you can also bypass all of PriceYak's wellness checks to "Force" an order through if you disagree with PriceYak's decision making. Much of this detail on this page is already shown on them main orders page, but here explanations of the other fancy details that we were saving for later:

• Address: If the order failed because something was funny about the way your buyer entered their address, you can click the little pencil in the upper right hand corner of this box to edit the address before asking PriceYak to try ordering it again.
• Maximum acceptable price: In order to avoid a significant loss, our AutoOrdering feature calculates a maximum price as 10% over the eBay price paid. For example, if an eBay user paid you $50, we could spend up to $55 on Amazon. If the price is greater than this, we will refuse to ship. This helps guard against serious errors which could cost hundreds of dollars. More an max_price here.
• eBay/Amazon/Shopify fee: the eBay final value fee shows exactly what fee eBay took from your sale. For Shopify and Amazon, the fee shown here is an estimate.
• Order Debugging; View Offer Listings: This will provide you with a log of all of the information on offers that PriceYak saw when it was getting ready to place your order. This will give you a lot of insight on why PriceYak chose to buy from one seller instead of another, if you compare the data with your offer selection settings. 
• Order Retries: We added this feature to help users differentiate between whether orders were "Retried" or "Forced." PriceYak considers both of these actions "retries," but only one of these actions has the potential to place a double order. This helps if you figure out whose fault it was if you think a double order has been placed. If it was a mere "retry," it could be a PriceYak bug and you should write to support about it. If there is a green checkmark under "Forced?" the double order was definitely your own doing :( 
• View Full JSON order (advanced): You will be able to find extra-extra fancy details about your order here, including more information on errors. 
• Force Order: ONLY USE THIS FEATURE IF YOU ARE CONFIDENT ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO DO. If PriceYak opts not to order the listing because of a max_price_exceeded warning, you can click this button to temporarily set max_price to $0 to retry and force the order through. PriceYak will still honor the rest of your offer selection settings, including max_handling_days. This button is NOT the same as a regular "retry," and will place a double order if you click it twice. Only click it once.  

Edit Order Blacklists
Just as you are able to blacklist brands/keywords/items from being listed, you can also put in an extra layer of safeguard by blacklisting certain sellers from buying from you. Entries in this list will be compared to an order's shipping addresses (without line breaks). If anything in this list is a substring of the address, the order will be skipped. You'll have to let your buyer know that you're not going to ship to them. Example address you can enter into this blacklist: "bob hope 4100 hamline ave n mailstop 5-360 golden hills oh 55112-5700 us (555) 555-4920"

Buy Gift Codes
Some PriceYak users prefer to run their entire business by making purchases with only gift cards. They do this for a number of reasons, including trying to avoid foreign transaction credit card fees. Piranha is a PriceYak tool that let's you buy Amazon Gift Cards from us via PayPal. It automatically applies gift cards to your Amazon account(s) as you need them. More on Piranha here.

Fix Problems

Track Unknown Listings
When you connect PriceYak to your stores, PriceYak will pull in all of your existing listings in those stores. You'll need to tell PriceYak where to buy those items by adding in product information for the source.

Track Unknown Listings with Invalid PIDs
Amazon likes to play musical chairs with ASINs, and sometimes it'll just randomly give items new ASINs.
We've done a lot of work to try to prevent this from affecting customer operations, and this is the best thing we've come up with so far: In order to make sure that we're ordering the correct item for you despite Amazon's arbitrary ASIN switching, we force these items OOS so that nothing goes wrong. You'll have to go to these out of stock listings in PriceYak and put in the new and correct ASIN for the item. Make sure you read this article for the trick to finding the correct new ASIN.

Delist Duplicate Listings
eBay HATES duplicate listings and will punish your account if they catch you making them. PriceYak usually detects and blocks duplicates as you try to list them, but if you have any listings that weren't created through PriceYak, we won't know that they're duplicates until after you've listed them. You can quickly delist duplicates from this page.

Delist Poor Performers
This feature does its best to show you what items are selling the least successfully so you an delist them and list other items instead. Due to an eBay bug, PriceYak may not currently be able to download all of your historical sales data. We have informed eBay of the bug and are waiting for them to fix it. In the meantime, this data may be incomplete.

Failed Revisions
If you have restrictions on your account (most often listing limits), PriceYak may not be able to revise your listings. We figured it'd be nice to let you know when this happens, so you can take measures to rectify the issue. We don't want you losing money just because eBay won't allow PriceYak to make the price and quantity changes necessary to protect you.

Reauthorize Store
Sometimes eBay will revoke your authorizations for security reasons, and you'll need to redo these authorizations to prove to eBay that you're still okay with giving PriceYak authority to act on your account. Also, reauthorizing stores sometimes also helps to recover missing orders and listings. 

Manual Tracking Upload
If for some reason the Zinc tracking system fails to fetch and upload your tracking for you, you can use this CSV upload to quickly plug in all of your tracking information for the down period.

Reporting Bugs

Reported URL: When you send reports in about issues with PriceYak, it's always helpful to attach the PriceYak link to the issue so we can pinpoint it more quickly. To do this, just log into PriceYak, find the listing, or order, or revision, or anything else, and simply copy and paste the URL in your browser over to us-- that'll take us directly to where your concern is.

My Account

This is where you can view your fees for each store, see historical invoices and fees, check if you're up to date on payments, and pay invoices.

fees so far vs. projected fees: "Fees so far" is how much you'd be billed if you stopped PriceYak today, basically. To get a more accurate estimate of your fees for your next invoice, switch the dropdown menu to "Projected Fees for X month."

Errors

Here is an overview of common errors you might encounter while listing, and how to fix them.

Here is an overview of common errors you might encounter while ordering, and how to fix them.