How a dropshipping customer's selling prices are set
Where the price comes from
Every product has our RRP, the recommended retail price. That is the starting point for every dropshipping customer and it is the same for all of them.
Each of the customer's sales channels (a Shopify store, a WooCommerce store, a manual store and so on) can have its own pricing rule:
- Percent — a percentage over the RRP.
- Fixed — an amount of money over the RRP.
- No rule — the product is priced at the RRP.
When the customer adds a product to the channel, aiku takes the RRP, applies the channel's rule, and that becomes the price shown in My Products. That is also the price sent to their Shopify or other store when the product is uploaded.
The cost price the customer pays us is not part of the calculation. The rule is added on top of the RRP, not on top of the cost.
What +100% and +200% really mean
The percentage is added to the RRP. Many people read it as a multiplier, and it is not one:
| Rule | Price | Example with RRP 16.18 |
|---|---|---|
| no rule or +0% | RRP | 16.18 |
| +50% | 1.5 × RRP | 24.27 |
| +100% | 2 × RRP | 32.36 |
| +200% | 3 × RRP | 48.54 |
Measured against the cost price, the jump looks even bigger: a product costing 7.17 with an RRP of 16.18 sells at 48.54 under a +200% rule, nearly seven times its cost.
Changing the rule does not reprice what is already there
The rule is used at the moment a product is added. If the customer changes the rule afterwards:
- products added from then on get the new rule;
- products already in the channel keep the price they were given.
So a customer who adds products, changes the rule, and adds more will see different markups in the same channel. Some products sit at the RRP because they were added before any rule existed, and others sit at 2× or 3× depending on the rule in force that day. This is the usual cause of "the markup is not consistent" reports. Nothing is wrong with our RRPs; the prices are exactly what the rule said at the time.
How the customer reprices their products
The customer does this themselves, in their own account:
- Open My Products in the sales channel.
- Select the products to reprice (select all to do the whole channel).
- Click Edit Price.
- Under Price Mapping, choose ± % over live RRP (or the fixed amount) and enter the markup, for example 100 for double the RRP.
- Save. The new prices are worked out from today's RRP and sent to their store.
Products repriced this way count as having their own price from then on.
When a customer reports "wrong RRP"
- Open the customer, go to their sales channels, and note the pricing rule on each one.
- Compare a few products: the RRP on the product and the price in the channel. A clean multiple (2×, 3×) of the RRP means a rule, not an error.
- Explain the rule and the table above, and point them to Edit Price to reprice.
If the price is not a clean multiple of the RRP and no rule explains it, raise a ticket with the product codes and the channel name.