Photo: Chase Binnie
April 29, 2025
With Tariffs Changing Quickly, Can Retail Pricing Keep Up?
With tariff policies changing week by week, many retailers and brands are struggling to update pricing quickly and consistently across channels.
The modern retailer has to syndicate data across multiple e-commerce sites, in-store systems, digital ads, third-party marketplaces, and more. That process remains painfully slow for many organizations.
“Being able to be nimble is more important than ever,” said Leah Allen, CMO of Syndigo, in an interview with RetailWire. She noted that, for many brands, product data is split between e-commerce platforms, spreadsheets, and legacy systems with no centralized source of truth.
“The sentiment we hear from C-level leaders is, ‘We have all these disconnected systems, and we know we need to bring them together,’” Allen said.
This isn’t just a data infrastructure problem. It’s a customer experience problem.
When skincare brand Foreo raised prices due to tariff-driven cost increases, it took a proactive approach. “We want to be fair to our consumers. The fairest thing is to give notice,” the company told Vogue Business. Foreo informed its customers via email, social, and website banners that prices would be increasing due to the U.S. tariffs and that they should buy now before prices go up.
Brands like Lingua Franca took a similar approach, publishing an open letter that walked customers through the cost pressures behind its price changes. In both cases, the issue wasn’t just pricing strategy. It was how well internal systems and external messaging could align under pressure.
Large retailers have already been working to fix these gaps. Target is upgrading its inventory management system with AI-powered tools to improve speed and reduce stockouts. Walmart has been rolling out digital shelf labels across thousands of stores, allowing stores to update pricing on more than 120,000 items within minutes.
These are serious investments, and they show that even for the biggest players, reacting in real time is a challenge worth addressing.
Smaller and mid-sized retailers face the same issue with fewer resources. Some have leaned into automation and AI, but Info-Tech Research Group cautions that without clean, structured product data, automation just accelerates the chaos.
That’s why tariff changes aren’t just policy shifts. They’re pressure tests. They reveal which retailers have built for speed and which are still dragging pricing updates across disconnected systems.
Discussion Questions
When pricing needs to change quickly across all customer touchpoints, what’s slowing retailers down?
How can smaller retailers compete on pricing agility when they don’t have Walmart-level resources?
Poll
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Clay Parnell
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Founder & CEO, HotWax Commerce
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Let’s be frank, the tariff policy is a hot mess. It seems to change with the wind, and it makes long-range (heck, any range!) planning impossible. Retailers can adjust the actual prices on websites and in stores fairly easily, although there is some work needed to implement. However, the calculations that go into those pricing decisions are not quite so simple – considerations like margins, sell-through rates, competitive dynamics, markdown planning, and so forth all need to be assessed. I guess AI can help with some of this, especially in automation. But until we have a clear and settled policy, retailers will remain on the back foot and in reactive mode.
Some of what slows retailers down is clarity of roles and decision-making. Data may also be a challenge, especially with rapidly shifting cost information. It’s important for retailers and brands to not become paralyzed by worrying about what they can’t control.
Pricing agility depends on numerous factors. Leading retailers and brands with the processes, data, and tools will manage better than others in a dynamic environment. Price management and optimization requires performance in all of the components (process, data, tools), along with attention to detail and agility.
Another critical component is the assortment – some product categories will be more impacted than others. Retailers and brands have the opportunity to curate their assortment to better manage price impacts. Finally, effective lifecycle price management over the season, with a focus on inventory, will be critical.
This….maybe not above all else, but certainly with it: perhaps even more annoying than a price going up consistently is it veering wildly all over the place. So if you’re a wholesaler/importer facing 25% tariff on Monday – unitl 2:13PM – then 10% for God-knows-how long…but it ended up not being long at all because by Thursday it’s now 15%, do you pass these on instantaneously, or try to smooth things? And if you raised prices when it was 25%, does it make sense to lower them when the rate falls (but for how long?) The retailer, of course, is on the receiving end of this – unless they import directly – but your customer will care little for your dilemma: if you raise prices immediately, you’ll be accused of gouging, and if you lower them it will be seen as proof of the accusation. By all mean get your Systems synced, but that will hardly resolve the issue(s)
One of my points, precisely.
The real problem here is that, as Neil points out, the administration has no idea of what it is doing, has no idea of who pays tariffs, and changes its mind day to day. Any retailer with perfectly aligned systems couldn’t keep up. What a hot mess indeed.
You will relate to my comment, for sure. Where the heck are our trade associations besides whining about swipe fees? Aren’t they supposed to advocate for the industry????
You forget what happened to Amazon today. For some reason, industry leaders are deadly afraid of making the president angry. I frankly don’t get it. He puts himself above the law, makes random, nonsensical decisions, and with a very few exceptions (thank you Harvard) just bend the knee.
so let me ask you all this? Where are our trade associations ? At least the toy association surveyed its membership and found out that some are expecting to go out of business while others are “postponing” orders.
I’ll ask again..,where are our trade associations besides arguing about swipe fees? Get up! Do your jobs! We are in serious trouble.
end of rant
Matt Shay was on Fox yesterday saying how it would hurt smaller business. Why hasn’t NRF launched a lawsuit against the use of the 1977 emergency tariff law? We are a laughingstock and in danger from what these first 100 days have wrought.
The better question is should retail pricing attempt to “keep up”? Reactions to erratic declarations do not a pricing strategy make. Retailers will have to look at the short-to-mid horizon and make prudent guesses. Here again, the more diversified players will have a far easier time navigating through without resorting to reactionary tactics.
This is challenging for many retailers at the best of times. As noted, legacy technology, disparate systems and unstructured data all play a role in what makes it so challenging. Throw fast changing tariffs into the mix, and this will be a big problem. Even the very best retailers will struggle to get pricing harmonized across all platforms and systems under these circumstances. Price mix ups impact conversion rates and customer service. Smaller retailers never have the resources and not just on pricing agility. Smaller retailers, big retailers and virtually all retailers are going to feel some operational pain related to the impacts of tariffs.
As a small made-in-USA manufacturer, I’ve found it much easier to communicate with & implement pricing changes with smaller retailers as the layers of management that drag their feet simply don’t exist. It’s the bigger national outfits (and a certain dot-com) that demand 90- or 180-day advance notification and then still demand our cost data & arbitrarily reject needed changes as “policy” or “in excess of overall inflation” to be the real self-created problems in the equation. Systems designed to drag out pricing decisions and wear down / wait out / deny at all times legitimate and ordinary changes from vendors are fundamentally incapable of dealing with existential shocks.
Legacy systems are complex and not easily adaptable to rapid price changes, which is one of the main challenges. It can also be challenging to coordinate and ensure consistency across multiple channels, such as online and in-store.
The lack of real-time data analytics and insights may also hinder the implementation of new pricing strategies in a timely manner.
Retailers with smaller operations can partner with technology providers who offer affordable, customized solutions. Data-driven insights can be gained through cloud-based pricing software and analytics tools, and real-time pricing adjustments can be automated. They can remain competitive through these partnerships without investing in extensive in-house resources.
There is no way smaller operators can make it work. This capricious administration has unleashed a 9/11 on retail. This has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with leadership or lack thereof.
Time and transparency. About all a retailer can do is wait as long as possible to make a pricing decision and then act, knowing their competitors are in the exact same boat. Some will protect gross margin % and some will protect gross margin $. Protecting the $$$ is the bet to make. Get the sale at a lower margin rate if you have to, but get the sale. And if the retailer is transparent (I’m not sure exactly what that entails in this completely wacky scenario) about both price increases and decreases, the customer will know it’s not the retailer jerking them around, it’s the Barnum & Bailey circus act running the government. Who would have ever dreamed that somebody would make retail more difficult that it already is…on purpose…?!?!?
The big challenge in developing tools that react to changes in demand signals, especially at the SKU level, is balancing between anomalies in demand, like the local school team needs green t-shirts for the entire class, and actual trends that indicate a need to make changes to inventory and sales models. As we learned at the start of the pandemic, shocks are particularly difficult. Implementing a knee-jerk tariff policy without any strategy or measurable goals has created an environment where volatility in demand has dramatically increased and the accuracy of forecasts has declined. This makes it really difficult for the tools many retailers have deployed to set prices that meet margin and sales goals. Even AI is likely to be thrown off by unexpected stimuli like a new decree or a sudden reprieve for some category.
Until/if this environment stabilizes, retailers are going to be in a tricky “react” mode as they balance margins and raise prices while taking on more inventory than they would probably like to manage shelf availability.
Assuming that we cannot make the administration behave rationally, and to answer the questions directly, there are retailers who will be able to keep pace and many (probably more) who won’t. The operative word is ‘nimble’ systems. We had been advocating for Unified Commerce for other worthwhile reasons but the tariff situation is as good a reason as any. POS pricing requires a ‘nimble’ Price-Change Management System. Those systems exist. Unified Commerce enables price changes for one channel to ripple through all selling channels. On the purchasing side, a robust Purchase Order Management System enables retailers to calculate a landed price at the time of purchase (assuming a tariff at the time of ‘landing’) and the retail price can ripple through to the selling price. The key is to have that robust, nimble ‘meat grinder’ into which the retailer puts the variables and comes out with a selling price, maintaining margins. However, as tariffs change, the retailer may find that there are – available for sale – pre-tariff, post-tariff, and “I changed-my-mind” tariff goods, all in stock. I predict that pre-tariff product will sell out before the post-tariff product. That was easy!
Retailers struggle with pricing agility because their systems are built for stability, not speed. When tariffs change frequently, disconnected data, outdated tech, and unclear ownership slow down the process. Pricing is not just a technology issue. It is also about how well teams are aligned and how fast decisions can be made. Smaller retailers may not have the same resources as larger ones, but they can still act quickly with the right approach. A clean product data foundation, visibility into cost changes, and clear communication channels help respond faster. The goal is not to match big players but to be responsive, accurate, and customer-focused within your capacity.
Tariff confusion in the business world is real. The changes make it difficult to predict and plan for the VERY short-term future. Retailers must be nimble and customers must understand that the retailers they trust (unless they have reason not to), are doing what they can to keep prices down and somewhat consistent. We’ve covered the tariff topic recently, and the only thing I can suggest, especially for small retailers, is price transparency. Give explanations for the inconsitent pricing.
The man who unleashed the tariff chaos on manufacturers, retailers and consumers alike said today (paraphrasing) that maybe your child needs two dolls instead of thirty, and maybe those dolls would cost a little more. At least an acknowledgement — in a backhanded way — that product shortages and higher prices are in everyone’s future. For retailers, no amount of digital signage can keep up, especially if the shelves are empty.
Excellent article that underscores the growing need for speed and agility in retail pricing, especially in a volatile tariff environment. The insights from Leah Allen of Syndigo hit the mark — disconnected systems and scattered product data make it nearly impossible to execute pricing changes consistently and transparently across channels.
Syndigo’s centralized data syndication and content management capabilities directly address this challenge. By serving as a single source of truth for product data, Syndigo enables brands and retailers to respond faster, update pricing accurately, and maintain alignment between internal systems and customer-facing touchpoints.
In today’s dynamic market, that kind of agility isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s mission-critical.