How Much of Your Catalog Is Mispriced Right Now? (Probably More Than You Think)

Every product in your catalog is in one of three states right now: priced about right, overpriced against the market, or underpriced against it. Most founders, asked to guess the split, say something like "mostly right, maybe a couple off." When we run store catalogs through our pricing engine, the typical picture is very different — it's common for a third or more of SKUs to sit far enough from market price that it's measurably costing money.

That's not because founders are careless. It's because pricing decays.

Prices are set once. Markets move weekly.

Think about when you priced each product: at launch, based on your costs and a look at a competitor or two. Since then, competitors have run promotions, adjusted for their own cost changes, entered or exited. Your supplier costs moved. Seasonal demand shifted. Every one of those events changed the *right* price for your product — and none of them changed the price on your site.

The result is drift. Not dramatic, headline-grabbing mispricing — just a slow spread between your prices and the market, SKU by SKU, in both directions at once.

The two failure modes, and what each one costs

Overpriced SKUs lose volume silently. A product priced 20% above a credible competitor doesn't stop selling — it sells to fewer people, and you read that as soft demand. So you run ads at it, which means you're now paying to overcome a pricing problem. The fix is usually not "discount everything" — it's a targeted correction on the specific SKUs where the gap is largest, protected by a margin floor so you never race to the bottom.

Underpriced SKUs are sneakier because nothing looks wrong. Sales are healthy. But every unit ships with margin left on the table, and unlike an ad campaign you can turn off, underpricing runs 24/7. These are often a store's best products — priced cautiously at launch, never revisited after the brand earned pricing power.

A framework for checking your own catalog

• Gather the gaps. For each product: your price, your cost, and the lowest credible competitor price. This is the tedious part — it's why nobody does it quarterly.
• Flag anything beyond ±10%. Inside that band, price differences read as positioning. Outside it, they read as a different product tier — and buyers act accordingly.
• Weight by profit impact, not by gap size. A 30% gap on a product that sells twice a month matters less than an 8% gap on your bestseller. Rank by monthly dollars, not percentages.
• Respect guardrails when correcting. Never price below cost plus a minimum margin, never chase a competitor more than ~10% down, and never move any price more than ~30% at once. Big swings confuse returning customers and destabilize demand.

Or let the machine do the tedious part

The data gathering above is exactly what we automated. Our free audit takes your raw Shopify product export, finds competitor prices via Google Shopping automatically, and runs every SKU through the same optimization engine our paying customers use — margin floors and guardrails included. You get the overpriced/underpriced split and the estimated monthly profit impact in about a minute: run the free margin audit.

The catalog you priced last year is not priced for this year's market. The only question is by how much.