Short definitions of the terms used in Pricenly and in the day-to-day of selling on marketplaces.
Buy Box
The Buy Box is the featured purchase area of a listing contested by several sellers — whoever "wins the Buy Box" gets the sale when a buyer clicks buy without manually picking a seller.
SKU
A SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is the internal code that uniquely identifies a product in your inventory, independent of how the marketplace names it.
MLB
MLB is the prefix of Mercado Libre listing identifiers in Brazil (for example,
MLB1234567890) — every listing has one, and it appears in the URL.
ASIN
An ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) is the ten-character code that identifies a product on Amazon, visible in the product page URL.
Stockout
A stockout is when a product becomes unavailable for purchase — in competitor monitoring, it is the window in which demand for that product tends to move to whoever still has stock.
Repricing
Repricing is the practice of adjusting a listing's price automatically in response to competitors' prices, instead of setting it manually.
Markup
Markup is the percentage applied on top of a product's cost to reach the selling price — if cost is 100 and markup is 50%, the price is 150.
Contribution margin
Contribution margin is what remains of the selling price after variable costs (product, marketplace commission, shipping, fees) are deducted — the amount that actually covers fixed costs and becomes profit.
COGS
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) is what the merchandise you sold in a period specifically cost, excluding operating expenses.
Price elasticity
Price elasticity measures how much quantity sold reacts to a price change — an elastic product loses many sales from a small increase, an inelastic one barely reacts.
Median price
The median price is the central value of an ordered list of prices — unlike the average, it is not distorted by a few very expensive or very cheap listings, which makes it more reliable for describing a market.
Seller reputation
Seller reputation is the public rating a marketplace assigns to a store based on delivery time, cancellations and complaints — it directly affects the chance of winning the Buy Box.
Free shipping
Free shipping is an offer where the shipping cost is absorbed by the seller or the marketplace — on Mercado Libre, the share of listings with free shipping in a niche is a direct indicator of competitive aggressiveness.
Sponsored listing
A sponsored listing is a search position bought through the marketplace's own advertising, rather than earned through organic ranking.
Price alert
A price alert is a rule that fires a notification when a monitored product's price crosses a threshold you define — downward, upward, or by percentage change.