About

I have worked in marketplace e-commerce since 2018, currently as Director, E-Commerce Consulting at Front Row Europe (formerly Finc3 Commerce) in Hamburg. Since 2020 I have also been building private label brands on Amazon with Hanseatic Commerce.

The second part is why this publication exists. Pricing those brands meant running manual tests: change a price, watch the rank, argue about what caused what. Rank moves for a dozen reasons, and with a handful of observations you cannot tell them apart. This is the same question with enough data behind it to compare against a control group.

The design follows Chapter 18 of Nick Huntington-Klein's “The Effect”, which I read in 2022. I am not an econometrician. The full protocol sits on the methodology page so that people who are can check it.

Each week I take one Amazon category and estimate how price changes moved sales rank in it. Every estimate is compared against a control group and published with its interval.

This is a publication, not a pricing tool. Nobody commissions a report, and no category is chosen because someone paid for it.

The archive is the point. The pattern across categories will say more than any single week does.

Categories are not picked at random. Each quarter takes one broad area and works through its subcategories week by week, so that by the end of the quarter there is a comparable set rather than a pile of one-offs. The quarterly report then puts them side by side: which subcategory responds most to discounts, where increases cost the most rank, how fast competitors answer a price move.

Later quarters will cover pet, home and kitchen, food and beverage, and baby and kids. The order can shift, and a category can drop out if the data does not support publishing it. If there is an area you want measured, write to me. The schedule has room.

The reports are written to be understood without any background in statistics. If a sentence needs a maths degree, it is badly written and I will rewrite it. The standard I hold myself to: a twelve-year-old should be able to read a report and say what it found.

That is a rule about language, not about rigour. The estimates, the intervals and the exclusions stay exactly as strict as they are. What changes is how they are said. “The interval includes zero” becomes “the range runs into the area where nothing happens, so I cannot tell”. Every term that cannot be avoided is explained the first time it appears, and all of them sit on the glossary page.

I sell on Amazon. Hanseatic Commerce operates private label brands in a small number of categories, and Front Row Europe, my employer, advises brands that sell on Amazon. Categories where either has a commercial interest are excluded from this publication. Where an exclusion would leave an obvious gap, the category is still measured and the report carries a note saying why it is absent.