Undercutting by one tick without starting a price war
Two repricing tools facing each other can walk a market down one step at a time until neither makes money. It isn't inevitable. Most price wars come from a few avoidable settings.
Beat by one step, never more
If the ad you want to beat sells at 0.874 and the price step is 0.001, your price is 0.873. Going to 0.870 doesn't buy a better rank. It gives away 0.003 on every unit, and it hands the next competitor a reason to follow you down.
Set a floor and mean it
The floor (for sell ads) or ceiling (for buy ads) ends a price war. Once the market goes past it, your ad stops there and stays listed. You may drop a few places, but you don't sell at a loss.
A good floor comes from what the crypto cost you:
floor = cost basis × (1 + margin)
With a cost basis of 0.8645 EUR per USDT and a margin of 0.8%, the floor is about 0.8714. For a buy ad the logic runs the other way: the ceiling is what you expect to resell at, minus your margin.
If you buy and sell continuously, a fixed number goes stale. Working the cost basis out from your recent purchases keeps the floor honest. P2P Trade Bot can do that automatically for sell ads (cost basis = auto).
Don't insist on first place
First place goes to whoever is willing to go lowest, and that is often someone with a worse cost basis or a promotion to run. Second or third place is still on the first screen, and it lets the leader absorb the price pressure.
Compete with the ads that matter
Many "competitors" aren't competing for your customers at all:
- ads that only accept small orders when you want large ones;
- ads without any of your payment methods;
- advertisers who are offline and not filling orders;
- a single bait ad priced far below the market.
Filtering these out means you are not chasing prices that no real buyer can use. The ranking guide explains why.
Size-aware positioning
A useful variation: only compete with ads that hold more inventory than yours. A small ad can't fill a large order, so its buyer ends up with you anyway. As your ad sells down, it becomes one of the smaller ones and competes more actively by itself.
Leave a tolerance
Changing the price for every tiny move adds edits without adding sales. A re-price tolerance, meaning "only change the price when it is at least this far from the target", keeps the ad stable when the market wobbles.
Checklist
- one price step better than the target, never more
- a floor or ceiling on every ad, ideally from your cost basis
- a target position you can hold profitably, often 2 or 3
- filters for order size, payment methods and inactive advertisers
- a small re-price tolerance
Related: working out real profit on P2P spreads.