Levamour sells Arabian perfumes through its own Shopify store. In the podcast above, Lev Butin (Handel by Lev) and David Sherman explain how they built Idealo into a traffic channel for the shop. The video was made in cooperation with PricePirate; all figures and quotes come from the conversation. (Note: the video is in German – the quotes below are translated.)
This article follows the structure of the video – if you want to listen to a particular part, you’ll find it here:
- from 03:15 – From TikTok Shop to their own online store
- from 04:25 – What Idealo costs for retailers
- from 06:45 – The problem: manual against automated competition
- from 11:15 – Repricing by minimum margin
- from 12:40 – The analysis: 60 out of 150 products overlooked
- from 14:35 – Onboarding and support
- from 16:55 – Diversification and cash flow
- from 21:50 – Trust beats the best price: the results
- from 24:50 – Integration: a channel that runs on the side
From TikTok Shop to Their Own Online Store
Levamour started on TikTok Shop. The channel worked, but it had a structural catch: all of the traffic depended on TikTok – and there, in turn, on influencers and their own content.
With TikTok Shop you are very heavily dependent on influencers. You send out samples, they make videos – and if anything goes wrong, an influencer doesn’t post or the sample doesn’t go out on time, the revenue at the end of the day isn’t what it should have been.
The conclusion was clear: their own online shop needed a second pillar that didn’t depend on content and creative output. The choice fell on Idealo – for a simple reason: people who search there want to buy. Unlike on TikTok, purchase intent doesn’t have to be created through videos first; on Idealo, buyers are only comparing where to order. Lev knew the principle from his Amazon days – the parallel to the repricing game there would become important later.
What Idealo Costs for Retailers
That the channel costs money is part of the calculation: Idealo bills per click – at Levamour that’s 51 cents, incurred with every click on the offer, regardless of whether the visitor buys.
You have to be very precise there. At the beginning we had great difficulty factoring that into our margin properly – and initially set the margin too low compared to the click costs. It wasn’t a disaster, because we were able to adjust it quickly.
The click costs aren’t a disadvantage, but a clean basis for calculation: in the Idealo dashboard, Levamour sees the clicks per product and can plan them firmly into the margin. (Our guide Selling on Idealo explains how registration, the data feed, and the cost model work in general.)
The Problem: Manual Against Automated Competition
The first successes came with new releases, where Levamour was often one of the few sellers. With established perfumes, things looked different: the manually entered price regularly ended up far down the offer list.
We had two problems there. First, visibility: the further down we are, the more invisible we are to the buyer. The second, very big problem: the buyer looks at all the offers, clicks on our offer too – we carry the click costs – but in the end they bought somewhere else. Those are empty costs.
The attempt to price against this manually failed because of the competition. The established sellers in the lower price range work with automated, dynamic price adjustment themselves:
We adjusted the price – three minutes later it had already been undercut again. That was not an effective approach.
With around 150 products in the assortment, the race couldn’t be won by hand:
Adjusting the price manually for 150 products and reviewing everything – I don’t even want to know how much time we would have spent on that. We still wouldn’t be done today.
The search for a repricer for Idealo led to PricePirate. (You can read how automated repricing on Idealo works in general in our article Idealo Repricing.)
Repricing by Minimum Margin Instead of Gut Feeling
Instead of typing in prices, Levamour set up its rules once: the purchase costs were already maintained in Shopify anyway, a minimum margin was defined on top of them – and the repricing was applied to all products.
You calculate your minimum price once – the price you need to make a profit. The repricer then doesn’t go any lower – if a competitor suddenly offers one euro, you don’t follow them down. There’s no need to panic that no profit will be left in the end.
For Lev, this was the difference from the repricing tools he knew from Amazon: there, you entered a fixed minimum price – with PricePirate, the system works directly with the desired margin and includes the stored purchase costs in the calculation.
The Analysis: 60 Out of 150 Products Overlooked
The second aha moment came with the analysis. PricePirate shows, among other things, the volatility per listing – that is, how often prices change on a listing – and thereby makes visible where price adjustments are actually worthwhile. The number of price adjustments can be focused specifically on the listings where there is movement.
After the analysis we saw: for almost 60 out of 150 products, price adjustments could have been made that would have made real sense. Margin-wise everything would have worked – we simply didn’t have it on our radar manually. That’s revenue you’re leaving on the table.
Onboarding and Support
The setup didn’t happen overnight: in the first one to two months, Levamour built the foundation together with PricePirate support – understanding the industry, understanding the analysis metrics, configuring the strategy. David explicitly highlights the support – not as a platitude, but as a point of differentiation:
These days, with new tools you often get some AI agent that can’t give you a detailed answer to specific questions. Having a personal contact person is a very big plus and has saved us a lot of time.
Levamour also requested the occasional feature of its own – and got it implemented.
Diversification and Cash Flow
With Idealo as a second channel, the dependency question changed fundamentally:
Because we now have several sales channels, we are spread broadly and no longer dependent on a single one. The more diversified you are, the more independent you are.
Added to this is a point that is often overlooked: cash flow. With TikTok Shop, Levamour waited around two weeks after delivery for the payout – with their own online shop, the money arrives much faster. And while marketplaces take sales fees, the own shop only incurs the calculable click price.
Trust Beats the Best Price: The Results
Levamour saw the clearest effect in the conversion rate – the share of paid clicks that actually turn into orders:
Since the repricer, we have roughly doubled our conversion rate.
What’s interesting here is that Levamour doesn’t have to be the cheapest seller for every product. A specialized shop with a clean presentation wins buyers even against large platforms:
Let’s say you’re in position 2 because Kaufland is three euros cheaper and your margin doesn’t allow that price. The buyer still visits your shop, sees: everything is clear, trustworthy, specialized in perfume – and then tends to spend the three euros more after all, but feels good about the purchase.
The good buying experience pays off twice: in Shopify, Levamour now sees customers on their fifth or sixth order – sometimes even when the price wasn’t the lowest at that moment. We’ve written in more detail about how price position and shop trust interact in our article Optimizing Your Idealo Conversion Rate.
Integration: A Channel That Runs on the Side
The technical connection of the Shopify store to Idealo ran through Idealo EasyConnect – another point Levamour deliberately didn’t invest its own time in. Today, the channel largely runs without intervention:
You set up the system once and have an additional source of income. Idealo is something we do on the side – we have to take care of very little, and the result is very convincing.
What Other Retailers Can Take Away from This
The Levamour story can be condensed into three points:
- Idealo is worthwhile as diversification – especially for retailers whose traffic depends on a single marketplace or channel. Buyers arrive with purchase intent; the channel doesn’t need content, it needs the right price position.
- Manual repricing fails against the competition. Anyone competing against sellers whose prices adjust by the minute loses the race by hand – and pays click costs for offers that aren’t competitively positioned.
- The margin belongs in the system, not in gut feeling. Maintain purchase costs, define a minimum margin, let prices adjust automatically – and use the analysis to see which listings are moving and where revenue is being left on the table.
Want to build Idealo into a sales channel like Levamour? PricePirate automates your Idealo repricing directly from Shopify – with minimum margins that protect your calculation. Start your free trial and meet PricePirate in a personal demo.
PricePirate is an independent product of UCX Media and has no business, partnership, or other affiliation with idealo internet GmbH.
