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Price volatility estimates how often the cheapest price of a listing changes per day. It appears as a column in the product metrics with the unit /day: a value of 3 means the cheapest offer changes its price an estimated three times a day.

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How the value is calculated

PricePirate does not watch the marketplace continuously – it only sees it at the moments of a synchronization. Volatility is therefore an estimated value: PricePirate compares consecutive measurements in the selected time window, counts how often the cheapest price changed between two measurements, and extrapolates this rate of change to a full day, corrected for the time between measurements. Three properties follow from this estimation:
  • More synchronizations make the value more accurate. When a listing changes its price several times between two measurements, only one of those changes is visible. The estimate compensates for this statistically, but it stays coarser the less often the listing is sampled.
  • The value needs a few measurements. When there are too few measurements in the window, the column shows a -.
  • The value is capped. PricePirate never reports more than 10 changes per day – for listings that restless, the sampling rate is the limiting factor anyway.

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Why volatility matters

Volatility tells you how quickly your market data goes stale – and therefore how often a listing should be synchronized. The higher the volatility, the higher the synchronization frequency should be. When a listing changes its price more often than it is measured, you miss price movements: ranks and price suggestions are then based on snapshots the market has already moved past. The reverse also holds: stable listings get by with few synchronizations – which saves credits. You adjust a listing’s Daily synchronizations in the synchronization settings.

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Volatility alerts

PricePirate warns you when a listing’s estimated volatility exceeds twice its daily synchronizations – the listing then changes its price considerably more often than it is sampled:
  • The dashboard shows the banner High price volatility detected with the number of affected products. The View warnings button opens the product settings, filtered to the affected products.
  • In the product settings, the affected products carry the High volatility status.
The warning only appears for products with active price monitoring. It disappears as soon as the synchronization frequency matches the volatility – or the market calms down.

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What you can do

  • Increase the Daily synchronizations of the affected listings in the synchronization settings. This makes the data more reliable, but consumes more credits.
  • Enable auto-applying price changes for highly volatile listings – they often move faster than a manual review can follow.
  • Reduce the synchronizations of stable listings to spend the saved credits where the market actually moves.
To see which listings move the most across the whole marketplace, check the activity report under Top volatile listings.