15-30 minutes can disappear each weekday morning when an independent seller checks prices. Open a tab, review a few competitors, remember where they sit, then move numbers up or down by hand. The work is repetitive and slow. Once the catalog grows beyond a handful of SKUs, it becomes a chore you dislike before it begins.
That is the problem behind the Seltova repricing agent. It runs after midnight, reviews the listings you have chosen, and updates them before your store opens. Here is what happens behind the scenes.
Scan timing and scope
The schedule matters. Shopify and Etsy both show "fresh" activity in search during the first hours of a browsing session. A price change recorded at 2am still looks recent when a buyer opens the app at 8am. That 6-hour gap gives the update time to work.
The repricing agent scans between midnight and 3am in your store's local timezone. For each active product, it uses the listing's search keywords to find competitor listings. The search is narrowed to the same product category, a similar seller rating range, and similar shipping time. It does not compare you with a brand that has 50,000 reviews. It looks at other independent sellers a buyer might reach in two or three clicks.
For each product type, the scan builds a pricing distribution. Where is your price within it? Is a cluster of sellers priced 8% below you? Did a highly rated competitor lower the price of a directly competing product?
How prices are changed
The agent does not chase the lowest price. Matching the floor starts a race downward, which is not the point. The aim is to remain competitive while protecting margin.
Before changing anything, the agent checks the limits set during setup. Each Seltova product has a floor price and a ceiling price defined by you. The floor protects margin. If a competitive price would fall below it, the agent leaves the listing alone and marks it for review the next time you sign in.
Inside those limits, you can tune the positioning logic. By default, prices sit in the lower third of the competitive distribution without reaching the floor. Sellers with stronger review counts or faster shipping can move that position to the middle. For newer listings with fewer reviews, the lower-third default generally helps them surface sooner.
The changes are modest, not overnight price swings. Moves of 2-5% are typical. The purpose is to hold a competitive position, not hit the bottom.
A sample overnight run
One early-access seller runs an Etsy ceramics shop with around 80 active listings. Before Seltova, she spent 20 minutes every weekday morning checking prices for her best-selling mugs and planters. She knew her main competitors roughly and used a quick visual check to see whether she remained in range.
After connecting the store, the agent scanned her listings during its first overnight run. It flagged 11 priced more than 12% above the median competitor. She had missed the drift because her manual checks covered only her top 10 SKUs. The agent reviewed all 80.
The agent moved 9 of those listings into the lower-third position while respecting their floors. The other 2 reached their floor before the target, so they were sent for manual review. Her morning dashboard showed each change and its reason.
What remains untouched
The boundaries matter. The repricing agent skips listings you mark as excluded. It will not cross a floor or ceiling. It does not use cost-of-goods data unless you enter it, and it does not decide on promotions or sales events. Those choices stay with you.
When a competitor posts a clearance-like price or makes a data error, the agent treats it as an outlier and leaves it out of the distribution calculation. One listing priced 60% below the median will not drag your prices down. Outliers are clipped before they affect the result.
What you regain by morning
The result is quiet, not dramatic on any single morning. Prices are set before the first customer arrives, and you did not spend 20 minutes setting them. Across a week, that is close to two hours of repetitive work returned to you. Across a month, the difference becomes noticeable.
The bigger change is moving away from reactive pricing. A manual check shows what is happening on one morning. The agent repeats that check each night and catches drift before it builds. If a listing slips out of range on Tuesday, it is corrected Wednesday morning instead of the following week, when you finally notice views have fallen.
Past 30 or 40 active listings, the calculation becomes clear quickly. Manual checks do not scale with catalog size. The agent does.
Start here
Connect your Shopify or Etsy store to Seltova, then set floor and ceiling prices during onboarding. Limits can apply per product or by category. You can also disable repricing on selected listings while keeping it on for the rest of the catalog.
The first overnight run creates a report for review before changes go live, if you select that mode. Once the positioning looks right, switch to fully automatic mode and changes will happen without a review step.
Setup takes about 20 minutes for a catalog of 100 listings. Afterward, the agent runs the nightly check by itself.