Guide

Let Glovebox adjust prices for demand

An optional layer on top of your pricing rules that nudges rates up when you are busy and down when you are not. It starts in shadow mode, where it shows you what it would have done without changing a price.

5 min read

This guide answers

  • Can Glovebox price automatically for demand?
  • What is shadow mode?
  • Will it change my prices without me knowing?
  • What is the difference between Demand pricing and Automatic demand pricing?

Revenue → Automatic demand pricing in the sidebar. Owners only.

Two screens, similar names

Worth settling before you go looking:

  • Demand pricing is where you write uplift rules by hand.
  • Automatic demand pricing — this guide — is the engine that works them out from what is happening in your fleet.

They are siblings under Revenue. This one has "Automatic" in front of it.

What it actually does

It multiplies your normal daily rate by a factor built from three things it can measure:

  • Fleet utilisation — how much of the relevant fleet is already booked for those dates. Busier pushes up, quieter pulls down.
  • Lead time — how far ahead the customer is booking. Last-minute costs more; booking early costs less.
  • Booking pace — whether that date is filling faster or slower than comparable dates usually do at the same distance out.

You set how hard it pushes with aggressiveness — conservative, balanced or aggressive — and it is clamped by minimum and maximum multipliers you control, so it can never move a price further than you allow.

It applies to customer quotes on your booking page. It does not override a daily rate you have set by hand on a booking.

Shadow mode first

Shadow mode logs what the engine would have charged without changing any price. This is where it starts, and it is the point of the feature: you get to watch it be right or wrong on your own fleet before a customer ever sees one of its prices.

The dashboard on the page shows what it recommended and, once bookings come through, how those recommendations converted.

  1. Turn on shadow mode and leave live pricing off.
  2. Let it run across a few weeks that include both a quiet stretch and a busy one.
  3. Read the dashboard. Are the uplifts ones you would have made yourself?
  4. Only then turn on live pricing, and start conservative.

Turning it on

On the same screen, switch live pricing on and pick your aggressiveness and multiplier bounds. Save.

Things worth knowing

  • It is off unless you turn it on. Both live pricing and shadow logging are off for a new account, so nothing happens until you choose it.
  • It needs history to judge pace. On a new account, or a vehicle group with little past data, the pace part stays neutral rather than guessing.
  • The URL still says "dynamic". The screen is at /admin/pricing/dynamic — an older name for the same thing. You are in the right place.

If it did not work

  • You cannot see the screen. It is owners only.
  • Nothing is being logged in shadow mode. Quotes have to come through your booking page for there to be anything to log; admin previews and recalculations are not counted.
  • The dashboard says the demand signal is neutral. Not enough comparable history yet. It will fill in.
  • Prices are not moving even though it is live. Check your minimum and maximum multipliers are not clamped together, and remember a manually overridden daily rate is never touched.
  • Charge more in peak season and less for long hires Your base daily rate is the starting point. Rules move it — up for summer, down for a fortnight's hire, whatever your season looks like. This is how they combine and which one wins.
  • Check your rates across the year A month-by-month view of what a hire would actually cost once your rules have applied. Useful for spotting a season you forgot. It does not save changes, whatever the Save button suggests.

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