Your margin floor: why a price can never drop below cost

This article explains the three layers that stop the repricer from ever pushing a listing below what it cost you, and why an item can be held instead of repriced.

The three layers of protection

Every proposed price change passes through three separate checks before it is allowed to reach eBay. Each one can block a change on its own.

1. Global minimum margin. Set once in Repricer → Settings, this is a minimum margin percentage that applies to every item the repricer touches. If a proposed price would leave less margin than this, the change is blocked.
2. Per-rule guards. When you build a rule, you can add a “set floor” or “set ceiling” action to it. This overrides the calculated floor or ceiling, but only for items that rule matches, so you can be stricter (or looser) for a specific category, source, or set of tagged items.
3. Per-item floor and ceiling. On an individual item, you can set an explicit floor and ceiling price. This overrides the default floor and ceiling the engine would otherwise calculate for that one item.

How a proposed price actually gets clamped

When the repricer runs, it does not just apply a rule and stop there. Every candidate price goes through the same sequence:

1. Your matched rules calculate a proposed new price.
2. The proposed price is rounded to the nearest penny.
3. It is checked against the maximum single-drop limit, so one run cannot cut a price too far in one go.
4. It is clamped against the floor and ceiling in force for that item (whichever of the three layers above applies).
5. If the item has a cost of goods (COGS) recorded, the resulting margin is checked against your minimum margin percentage.

If a proposed price fails any of these checks, that item is left unchanged for the run and marked as blocked with a reason, rather than being repriced on a best guess.

Where the default floor comes from

If you have not set an explicit per-item floor, the engine calculates one automatically from the item’s cost of goods. This is what keeps a rule like “reduce price by 5% every 3 days” from quietly grinding a listing down past what it cost you.

What the minimum margin check does and does not cover

The global minimum margin check also depends on COGS: it can only work out a margin percentage when the item’s cost is known. If an item has no COGS, the minimum margin check is skipped for it, and you are relying on the floor (per-item, per-rule, or the default calculated one) as the only safety net. This is another reason to keep COGS entered on items you are repricing.

See the related articles below for more on setting up repricer rules.