First. some basics: Aura was cofounded in 2018 by Dillon Carter and his cofounder James Yanyuk. Both Amazon sellers, they launched Aura off the success of their previous software tool called Vendrive (a wholesale sourcing tool for Amazon sellers).

An image of Aura's website from 2019.

#2: The "Bundle Blindspot." This is caused by a weird aspect to how Amazon passes its pricing data to repricing tools. When a tool like Aura says "hey Amazon, tell us the lowest 10 offers so we can reprice this item." Amazon doesn't simply share the lowest 10 prices. It uses a secret formula to "bundle" similar offers together, and shares 10 "groups" of offers. Each "group" can represent between 1 and several actual offers.

Confused yet? It's okay, because all this means is that this "bundle blindspot" prevents repricers from being able to compare your price to anything other than the lowest price. The lowest price is the only price software tools can see with certainty.

This is why no repricer (except for one) will allow you to set a rule that says (for example) "price 10% above the 2nd lowest price" (or anything that doesn't involve the cheapest competing offer). They don't offer it not because every seller isn't clamoring for it. They don't offer it because they can't - due to this blindspot.

Keep these two blindspots in mind as this comparison continues. It should factor heavily into what repricer you choose - and which one I declare the winner at the end of this article.

Aura pricing table. Unclear what the $27/month plan is. It is not publicly available and requires an application process, and it only open to current Aura subscribers.

While NeuroPrice costs significantly less than Aura, it should be mentioned that "cheaper" can actually be more expensive. Keep what follows in mind as you shop for a repricing tool.

Even if Aura was more expensive, there are a couple of features of NeuroPrice that virtually guarantee it will extract more revenue from your inventory than a competitor - much more than the extra money you might pay (depending on your inventory size). In other words, it costs more to not have access to these features, which can make the "cheaper" option actually more expensive.

The two obvious features are:

1. No FBA data blindspots
2. Being able to target higher priced competitors (not just the lowest)

Since both of these result in NeuroPrice extracting more profit from a certain portion of your inventory, it literally means more cash in your pocket.

How much more? Impossible to quantify, but let's say your inventory is 1,000 units. And let's say each of these two features converts to an extra $5 per day. That's $300 extra revenue per month that you're extracting from the same inventory vs another tool. What if each one only extracts $2 per day (a pretty absurdly low number, in my opinion)? That's still $120 a month.

For that reason, the conservative math usually favors NeuroPrice, any way you run the numbers.

(You may also decide, since other tools may have an increased level of automation, that this will translate into more revenue for you. This is reasonable as well, especially if you're a larger seller.)

Let's proceed with the assumption you're going to create a custom strategy. Here are the steps...

Step One: Establish your competition

This is where you let Aura know what type of offer you want to target and which types of sellers you want to exclude. For example, you may want to target the current Buy Box offer while excluding sellers with a longer handling time.

Your options in this step are:

*Featured sellers only: You compete against featured sellers only (Featured sellers are those that are eligible for the Buy Box.
*Exclude Amazon as a competitor. You compete against Amazon. Choose to ignore Amazon when found on a listing.
*Exclude back-ordered sellers: You will not compete against back-ordered sellers
* Exclude sellers whose inventory is not yet available.
* Exclude sellers below a set feedback rating: Sellers below this feedback level will be excluded as competitors.
* Exclude sellers with longer handling time: Competitors with a long handling time will be excluded.
* Compare subcondition: The subcondition of used items to be considered competition.

Step Three: "Maintenance."

Tell Aura how to behave once you've won the Buy Box — you may want to raise, lower, or hold your price. Aura will adjust your price to the next-most likely Buy Box winning offer above yours once you're in the Buy Box. For example if that offer is $28.00, your offer is $27.00, and your strategy is set to reprice $0.01 below the competition, Aura will take your price to $27.99.

Step Four: Set your Min/Max price

In this step, you set your strategy-wide minimum and maximum pricing. Aura will automatically take into account reduced profit ranges for your listings and price accordingly. Aura will set the minimum and maximum prices for each listing dynamically based on the minimum and maximum return on investment that is set for this strategy.

Options to calculate your minimum and maximum price:

* Minimum ROI: Includes cost, all marketplace fees, and shipping.
* Maximum ROI: Includes cost, all marketplace fees, and shipping.
* Profit floor: If enabled, Aura will use this value as a fixed lower bound (floor) on profit while calculating your minimum price. This is useful for lower-priced products, when you want to make at the very least $X in profit per unit.

Step Five: Set your Workflow

The exact definition of "Workflow" isn't clearly explained, but  Workflows come in three parts:

1. Events
2. Workflow
3. Review

First, you add an Event:
1. Schedule (create repricing schedule)
2. New listing (not clear what this means)

Next, add a Workflow, which has four options:

1. Filter by marketplace: Which marketplace(s) will your workflow filter by?
2. Filter by strategy: Which strategy will your workflow filter by?
3. Filter by SKU: Which SKU(s) will your workflow filter by?
4. Filter by title: Which title will your workflow filter by?

Last step: Set a pricing schedule

All that's left is to apply a strategy you just created to a repricing schedule. You can also pause pricing, or turn it on or off.

As a cool bonus, Aura integrates with InventoryLab, Terminal, and Payability.

And that's the entire process.

Since it can be hard to visualize everything I'm talking about here, I made a video tour of me going inside Aura and walking through all the steps. This is my first time seeing Aura, so you'll see me narrating every feature and setting as I navigate it for the first time.

My in-depth tour inside Aura.

My attempt with this article was to provide the only deep analysis of these two repricing tools: An established repricer vs the new "disrupter" in the Amazon repricing space.