FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers to common questions about Optifi here. If you have a question not covered here, please contact us.

How does it work?

How does Optifi find the best pricing for my catalog?

Optifi finds the sweet spot for the prices for your products using small-scale pricing experiments. It uses a sophisticated statistical machine learning algorithm that identifies the next price to test that is expected to have the greatest improvement from the current best price and it tests it (using Bayesian experimentation). This allows the algorithm to rapidly explore the range of possible prices to arrive at the optimal price for a product very quickly.

Optifi learns the relationship between profit and price, it doesn't just test one price versus another. This makes it highly efficient and mathematically proven to be able to find the optimal (very best) price to give the highest profit.

What does autopilot mean?

Optifi Autopilot is designed to maximize your profits by continuously learning the optimal (i.e. the sweet spot) prices for your products—without requiring manual effort from you (unless you want to run it in advanced mode!).
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Here’s how it works:
1. Smart Mini-Experiments: The system carefully tests small price variations on sets of products to understand how price affects sales and profits. These tests are structured and controlled, and optimal.
2. Stable Pricing Between Optimizations: Once the system identifies an optimal price for a product, that price remains stable until it detects that re-optimization is needed—ensuring price consistency for customers.
3. Batch Optimization Approach: It works on a set of products at a time, optimizing them fully before moving on to the next batch. This ensures focused, effective pricing improvements across your catalog.
4. New Product & Market Expansion: When you introduce new products or enter new Shopify markets, the autopilot intelligently estimates optimal starting prices and refines them as it gathers real data.
5. Adapting Only When Needed: Prices won’t constantly change once optimization is complete for a product. The system continuously monitors performance and only adjusts when there’s strong evidence that a better price will increase your profit.
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Unlike other pricing methods, our autopilot doesn’t make frequent or unpredictable price changes. Instead, it experiments for a little while and finds stable, highest-profit price points and only updates them when necessary.

Can Optifi help with discounts, coupons, offers, shipping thresholds, etc?

Yes! By default Optifi works with pricing optimization, but if you're interested in an alternative use case like deciding what discounts to offer or setting shipping thresholds, please get in touch. We're working on new solutions all the time and would love to talk to you.

Can I set minimum, maximum, or recommended pricing?

Yes! Optifi allows users to specify lower and upper pricing limits and also recommend prices (such as manufacturer recommended pricing). This helps both guide the algorithm and sets failsafes so you can trust that Optifi will achieve the best profitability for your store.

Can Optifi's autopilot be paused for certain products, markets, or during certain periods?

Yes. You can pause the autopilot for specific products, markets, and periods to prevent prices from changing.

Can I use it in manual mode rather than autopilot?

Yes. Even with autopilot, Optifi will ask you about important decisions it wants to action. But you can also get us, an agency, of your team to manage the optimizations in advanced mode.

What do you mean by ‘optimal’ pricing

Optimal is a word that is often abused. It does not mean a single incremental improvement. It really means improving something to achieve the best possible outcome. It doesn't just find a better price; it finds the pricing 'sweet spot'. That's the price that achieves the very best profit possible. It leaves nothing behind in the margins when it comes to pricing.

Optifi does this automatically on autopilot, and is mathematically proven scientific approach to finding the absolute best price for your profits, not just test an incremental improvement. And it does this fast.

You can't find the sweet spot by e.g. hypothesis testing price A versus price B. You need a process that will get you to the very best price possible, and won't take forever. Rather than hypothesis test A versus B, Optifi learns the price-profit curve using scientifically valid experimental and machine learning techniques.

Which stores benefit most from Optifi?

Most stores will benefit from Optifi. The highest value will come for D2C brands, particularly those looking to grow and scale.

Because we focus on profits and expanding margins, stores dropshipping or selling commodity items might be better off with dynamic pricing.

Outcomes

Will experimentation affect my profits?

Optifi is designed to maximize your profits and keep them optimal over time. We've been seeing a 30% uplift in profits on average, but the exact uplift will depend on your store.

While the algorithm is learning you may temporarily experience lower profits on some days, but this is quickly outweighed by improvements to pricing and profitability. Our technology is specifically designed to minimize reduced profits during experimentation and achieve much higher long-term profitability within days or weeks.

Our algorithms are mathematically proven to achieve the best profitability in the least time, so you can trust Optifi to find the best pricing strategies for your business.

What do customers experience during testing?

Because price changes are small and gradual - and shoppers naturally expect some variation over time - none of our existing customers have reported any issues. Optifi is not dynamic pricing: we don’t change prices in real time or show different prices to different customers once an optimal price is found. Instead, prices only change during the experimentation period, like in A/B testing. The approach also works seamlessly with platforms like Google Shopping, since only one price is active at a time.

Most of our customers optimize a few products at a time. Once an optimal price is found, it’s fixed, and Optifi switches to monitoring mode. Prices stay stable unless there’s a significant shift in market or consumer behavior, in which case Optifi quickly re-optimizes based on what it has already learned, so the process is fast and efficient.

How much extra profit can I expect using Optifi?

Profit improvements can vary widely depending on the specific store, with profits usually increasing by between 10% & 70%, averaging around 30%. For example, if your store currently generates $1m in profits per year, using Optifi could result in a $300k profit uplift (an ROI of >30x).

Will Optiti impact my site speed?

No!

Requirements

Is there a minimum number of sales I need to make to work with Optifi?

Not really. Unlike other machine learning algorithms, Optifi is built on a type of machine learning called "Bayesian ML" that is highly efficient. This means you don't need to make many sales for the algorithm to work well, this is an important benefit of Optifi's approach. The bottom line is that you can start using Optifi even if you only make a handful of sales. That said, the more sales you make, the faster the optimal price will be found.

What support do I get setting up?

We will offer onboarding to help you set up and check in with you. For businesses that want a further white glove service, we can help you to get much more out of your optimizations with our advanced setup add-on.

Does it need competitor data?

No. Optifi doesn’t need any data pipelines or complex setup. Yet competitor pricing (and differential branding) feeds in its optimisations. It uses advanced experimentation to find optima prices. This is what benefits stores. If direct competitors have lower prices, then it will be borne out in your customers’ purchase behaviour, and Optifi knows about it.

Compatibility

Will Optifi work with my store?

Optifi will work with most e-commerce platforms and systems. We currently primarily support Shopify but we can also provide integrations to other systems under the enterprise plan. In terms of profit increases, Optifi will work well with most stores, but if sales are very low per product it might take some time to tune the pricing.

Does it work with Shopify Markets?

Yes! Optifi seamlessly integrates with Shopify Markets and handles currency conversion and price presentation in other currencies for you. Many customers have unlocked significant value by using Optifi to optimize pricing across different regions, often finding that price variations can dramatically impact profitability. Launching in a new market? Unsure if different markets should be priced differently? That’s the perfect opportunity to let Optifi identify the best pricing strategy to maximize your profits.

Does it work with subscription apps?

Yes! It works with subscription apps, and we already have customers happily using it in conjunction with subscriptions.

Does it work with bundle apps?

Yes! It works with bundle apps, and we already have customers happily using it in conjunction with bundles.

Does it work with Google Shopping?

Yes, it has been carefully crafted to work well with Google Shopping. Because Optifi changes the core price, the price is pushed through to all channels.

What if we also sell on Amazon/eBay/etc?

That’s fine! You can set the bounds (e.g. min price) within which you want Optifi to operate for a product. Most brands we’ve worked with have found that their own branded webpages can charge more of a premium. There’s value in your brand!

Comparisons

How is this different from A/B testing prices?

Optifi isn’t A/B testing—it’s real scientific price optimization. Why settle for “better” when you can find the best? The difference to your profit is massive.

A/B testing is designed for hypothesis testing, not optimization. Optifi, on the other hand, doesn’t just test price points—it learns the entire price-profit curve. Genuine optimization requires learning, not just testing.

Imagine spending months A/B testing different prices, only to settle on one that performs slightly better. But what if another price - one you never tested - could have increased your profit by 20%? A/B testing wouldn’t reveal that. Optifi would.

When it comes to pricing, A/B testing is slow and it's wasteful. It treats every test as an independent event. When you test $100, A/B testing learns nothing about $101 or $110 - because it only sees the exact price points you test.
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Optifi is mathematically proven to find the optimal price; the absolute best there is. Instead of testing individual hypotheses one by one, Optifi maps the whole function, ensuring you don’t get stuck in suboptimal pricing traps (such as local optima or Veblen effects).

With autopilot optimization and no complex setup, Optifi eliminates guesswork and avoids local pricing traps.

How is this different from dynamic pricing?

1. Optifi does not dynamically change prices outside of the experimentation phase. It finds the optimal price and then sets it. So your prices are stable with Optifi, outside of short experimental periods.
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2. Optifi does not need any data pipelines unlike dynamic pricing.
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3. Optifi finds the best price for profit, dynamic pricing is not designed to do that (it’s designed to spike prices up and down but cannot know the best price for profit).
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In general dynamic pricing is suitable for dropshippers or sellers of commodity products. Optifi is for brands. For more detail see our free e-book.

What’s the difference between Optifi and competitor price-syncing?

Price syncing can work well for some products and brands with very low differentiation because they compete primarily on price, but this isn't the case for most brands. Differences between stores such as brand image, product quality, differentiation, warranties, shipping thresholds etc can have a big impact on how customers respond to product pricing.

To get pricing right, you need to tailor pricing to your store, not your competitors' - this is where Optifi comes in. Optifi does implicitly consider competitor prices, but without knowing them. That’s because competitor prices impact conversions, and our experimental approach directly examines that impact on profit (along with margin). Thus, Optifi considers competitor prices while also valuing your brand and your customers.

What's the difference between this and other AI approaches?

Any approach based on existing data alone cannot find the optimal price. Think about it, you've previously sold a product at $100 and $110 dollars. The AI can't possibly know that the optimal price is $220 because it's too much outside the range of its training data. It's no idea how customers will respond. Our approach uses the latest developments in causal AI with intelligent Bayesian experimentation and can always find the optimal price - which usually falls outside of the training data.
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Optifi also cannot make mistakes or hallucinate. Unlike genAI approaches, we use modern scientific machine learning tailored to the job (causal ML, Bayesian experiments, and more). This favours science and elegance over brute force (we’re scientists after all!). It is mathematically proven to always find the optimal price within the bounds you set.

How is optimization for profit different to optimization for conversion rates?

Margin matters too! When it comes to pricing, optimizing for conversion rate is not the same as optimizing for profit. A lower conversion rate with a juicy margin means more profits, loyal customers, and simpler logistics.

Is changing the price better/worse than split testing?

A/B tests need to perform split testing. This has the disadvantage of needing to create product duplicates (or using Shopify functions), and takes longer than changing the core price. It can also create problems with Google Shopping and other apps and services. Changing the core price will finish the experimentation phase earlier, while the same number of customers still see the experimental price.

Is my data safe with Optifi?

Yes! At Optifi we take security very seriously and employ rigorous internal security practices. Your data are encrypted at rest using AES-256 and in transit via TLS.

How Optifi Works

1 - Install Shopify App

2 - Configure Optimization

3 - Enable Autopilot