We build a repricer for Bol.com, the big Dutch and Belgian marketplace, and one question we get from sellers all the time goes like this: I changed my price, I opened the product page, and the old price is still there, so what went wrong? Usually nothing did, and it helps to know which of two delays you are looking at.
Is it your browser or the marketplace?
The first possibility is your browser. Product pages are heavy, so your browser keeps parts of them in its cache to load the next visit faster, and if you had the page open a minute ago you may simply be looking at your own stored copy. A hard refresh (Ctrl+F5 on Windows, Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac) or a private window tells you within seconds whether that is the case.
The second possibility is the marketplace itself. A price change travels from your seller account through the marketplace's systems before it shows up on every product page, search result and offer list, and on Bol.com that usually takes a few minutes. Clearing your cache won't make that any faster.
How do you tell the difference?
Open the product page in a private window. Is the new price there? Then it was your cache. Is the old price still showing? Then the change is still on its way and you just wait a few minutes. The list of other sellers on the product page is worth a look too, because it is often updated at a different moment than the main offer.
Why do a few minutes matter?
On Bol.com most sales go to the seller who has the buy box, and price is one of the things that decides who gets it. When a competitor lowers their price and you respond five minutes later, you have missed five minutes of sales on that product, and with a few hundred products you can't keep up by hand. That is why sellers with a larger range use a repricer, which checks the competing offers and adjusts the price automatically, always between a minimum and maximum the seller sets.
A repricer gets its prices straight from the marketplace instead of from a web page, so a cached page never fools it. If you sell on Bol.com, you can try Altijd Koopblok, the repricer we built only for Bol.com, which is free for up to 500 products.