Why Is My Price at Its Min or Max?

Every price change Aura makes is recorded in Pricing Activity.

The full log lives in the Pricing Activity page. To jump straight to one listing, open its detail page, click the three-dot menu (top-right), and choose Go to pricing activity — this pre-filters the log to that SKU.

Each entry is a snapshot of the moment the price changed. It records:

Because each entry is a point-in-time record, it won't always match what you see today. If your costs, your limits, or the competition have changed since, the log still shows what was true when the change was made. That's what makes it useful — it tells you why Aura made that decision then, not what it would do now.

This is the most common reason a price looks wrong, and it's usually inventory status rather than repricing.

Aura holds a listing at its max price whenever there's no fulfillable stock. A listing counts as out of stock for as long as its FBA inventory is coded as Backordered, and until at least one unit is checked in and marked Fulfillable. Backordered includes units that are Inbound, Reserved, Pending Transfer, or Researching.

How to confirm: in Aura, hover over the unit count on the listing. The hover shows a full breakdown of that listing's inventory — how many units are Fulfillable, and how many are Inbound, Reserved, or Pending Transfer. This is the fastest way to see what Aura is actually working with.

What happens next: once at least one unit becomes Fulfillable, Aura automatically resumes competing based on your strategy and the current competition. No action needed.

To limit how high the price goes while out of stock: on a Maven strategy this behavior is built in and can't be switched off — instead, manually lower the auto-max price on that listing. On a rule-based strategy, the equivalent control is under Pursuit.

This is most likely the Yo-Yo functionality. It periodically raises a listing to its max price for a set period, then returns it to competing normally. It's a setting, not a fault.

Yo-Yo is configured with a Frequency (how often the cycle starts) and a Duration (how long the listing stays at its max). Because it runs on a schedule, checking a listing at an arbitrary moment will often catch it mid-spike. If the same listings are at max every time you look, this is the likely cause.

Yo-Yo functionality can be configured in two places, and turning it off in one does not disable the other:

Check both before concluding it's off.

On rule-based strategies, four scenario-based settings under the Pursuit tab decide what Aura does when it can't compete normally — and several of them can raise your price to its max. The most common example is when the competition is priced at or below your min price.

If a listing is sitting at its max with no recent activity, and its inventory is fulfillable, check these four settings. If you'd rather Aura stayed as close to the competition as possible, set it to remain at your min price instead — Aura can't price below your min, so this keeps you as competitive as your limits allow.

These settings apply to rule-based strategies only:

For the full walkthrough with screenshots, see Listings stuck at Max prices.

If a listing hasn't moved in days, Aura is usually already as close to the competition as your limits allow. There are two versions of this, and they look identical from the Listings page.

The buy box is at or below your min. Aura can't price below your min, so it holds there. Example: your min is $9.99 and the buy box is $9.99. On a rule-based strategy, check your Pursuit scenario settings as well — this is one of the situations where Aura can be configured to raise to your max instead of holding at your min (see the section above).

In both cases the repricer is working correctly — the constraint is your min price, not your strategy. Pricing Activity shows the min that was in effect and the competitor price Aura was targeting, which tells you which situation you're in.

If you want the listing to compete lower, lower the min. If your min reflects real costs, the listing may simply not be profitable at the current market price.

If Aura is pricing below the level you can make money at, the min price is almost always built from incomplete cost data.

Aura calculates your min from your buy cost plus your target ROI, and automatically accounts for Amazon's referral fee and, on FBA listings, the fulfilment fee. Every other expense — inbound shipping, prep, labels, and on FBM the cost of shipping the item to the customer — must be entered in the Additional Cost field, or it won't be reflected in your min price.

Your target ROI is calculated against your buy cost plus any additional costs, so entering them raises your min on both counts.

Example — an FBM listing, using a 15% referral fee (rates vary by category):

Your buy cost is $8.13 with a 10% target ROI. Aura works back from the fee and arrives at a min of $10.52.

If it also costs you $2.50 to ship the item and $0.40 to prep it, your real cost is $11.03 — and the min needed to hit the same 10% return is $14.27. Until those costs are entered, Aura will keep repricing down to $10.52, because as far as Aura knows, that price clears your target.

Note that adding $2.90 of costs raised the min by $3.75, not $2.90. The referral fee is a percentage of the sale price, so it rises alongside it, and your ROI target now applies to a larger cost base.

Send us:

That entry holds the min/max prices, strategy, and competitor price exactly as they were at the time, which is usually enough for us to answer in one reply instead of three.