Maven is Aura’s first AI strategy model. Maven is built to optimize for both sales velocities and profit margin, at the same time. The balance between these is calculated as the optimal price. 

Additionally, Maven will automatically calculate Max prices in real-time based on competitor and listing factors. You may still manually set/override any Max price calculated by Maven.

Here is a breakdown of how Maven behaves under different listing scenarios.

Following game-theory, Maven will create “profiles” of all active competing offers on an ASIN.

These profiles are based upon cooperative vs. uncooperative behavior. An example of cooperative behavior is a competitor that matches, or prices above your offer. A competitor who reprices below your offer is considered uncooperative.

Based on these behaviors, Maven will track each Seller ID as cooperative or uncooperative. Following Maven’s efforts to maintain profit margin, Aura will reprice cooperatively where it can. This means Maven will match offers that are cooperative, and will price below uncooperative offers. 

When a Buy Box is won, Maven will attempt to increase the overall profit margin where it can. To do this, Maven will attempt to raise your price gradually, until the Buy Box is lost.

Once this “tipping point” is found, Maven will reprice to win the Buy Box, and raise it as high as it possibly can while maintaining Buy Box ownership.

Generally speaking, Buy Boxes become suppressed when all offers on an ASIN are considered to be too high.

Once a Suppressed Buy Box is detected, Maven will begin gradually lowering your price from where it was previously. This is designed to “test” different price points to try and find the price where the Buy Box can be reactivated.

Maven will continue to lower your price until one of two things occur:

When no competition is found on a listing, Maven will attempt to find the optimal price.

The optimal price is where Maven finds the greatest sales velocities balanced with the highest overall profit margin.