Safe Mode: preview repricing before it touches eBay

Safe Mode lets you see exactly what the repricer would do to your prices before any change actually reaches eBay. This article explains what Safe Mode shows you, how it differs from going live, and the one limit worth knowing before you switch it off.

What Safe Mode does

When you first turn the repricer on, it starts in Safe Mode by default. In this state the repricer still evaluates your rules on schedule and works out what each listing’s new price would be, but it stops there: nothing is written back to your live eBay listings. You get a preview of the moves it would make, so you can check the rules are behaving the way you expect before any real price changes go out.

Safe mode versus live

The repricer status line on the Repricer page shows one of three states:

• Off: the repricer is not running at all.
• On, safe mode: the repricer is running on schedule and evaluating your rules, but every change is a preview only. Nothing is pushed to eBay.
• On, live: approved changes are pushed to your eBay listings automatically, within the rules and the margin floor you have set.

You can run the repricer manually at any point while in Safe Mode to see a fresh preview of what it would change, without committing to anything.

Going live

When you are happy with what Safe Mode is previewing and want the repricer to start pushing real price changes, you switch Safe Mode off. This does not happen silently: a confirmation step appears explaining that the repricer will start pushing real price changes to your live eBay listings, within your rules and margin floor, and asks you to actively confirm by choosing “Go live” before anything changes. Until you confirm, no prices move.

Once live, you can still undo the most recent repricing cycle if a rule did not behave as expected, which restores the prices from before that cycle ran.

Why this matters

Repricing rules can be easy to get slightly wrong, especially when you are first setting margin floors or competitor-tracking rules. Safe Mode gives you a genuine dry run against your real listings and real rule logic, so you can catch a misconfigured rule while it is only a preview, rather than after it has already changed prices on eBay.

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