Cost, fees and profit

Your cost plus the fee the sales channel takes is what turns a price into profit, and the table shows you all three once the cost is there.

Your cost is what one unit of an item costs you. There is one cost per listing and you put it there yourself, because until it is there the Repricer cannot tell you whether a sale makes you money.

On a marketplace, where you sell alongside other sellers, the Repricer also estimates the fee the channel takes out of a sale at your current price. Put the two together and you get profit: your price, minus that fee, minus your cost. There is a column for each of the three on every row of your listings table.

Most people come here for one of three reasons. The Profit column is empty and they want to know why, repricing has stopped on listings that need a cost, or they want to know what a sale really leaves them.

You get to all of it from Listings, in the sidebar down the left. Cost, Fees and Profit are three columns in the table, and the full breakdown for one item is on the Insights tab inside a listing.

Before you start

What your role lets you do

Roles are set in team, roles and permissions.

A zero in a file clears a cost

How to get a cost onto your listings

1. 1

   See what is there already

   Click Listings in the sidebar down the left and read the Cost column. On a store of your own, some rows are filled in before you touch anything, because the Repricer copies the cost you already keep on the product.

2. 2

   Type a cost on one listing

   Click the cell in the Cost column on the row you want. It turns into a box. Type the amount and press Enter.

3. 3

   Send the rest in with a file

   For more listings than you want to type, click Uploads in the sidebar and run an import with a SKU column and a Cost column in it.

4. 4

   Check the profit

   Back on Listings, the Profit column on that row now has a number in it. Hover the cell for the sum that produced it.

That is all a cost needs from you. Profit fills in on every listing that has one, and a listing whose strategy builds its floor out of your cost starts repricing again as soon as the number saves.

Everything below explains where a cost can come from, which channels get a fee estimate, and what that estimate leaves out. You do not need any of it to fill a cost in.

Every option in detail

Where your cost comes from

There is one cost per listing, and everything in the table below writes to it. The same item on two connected accounts is two listings, so it has two costs, and filling one in does nothing to the other.

A store of your own can fill the cost in for you, once. Shopify and BigCommerce both keep a cost on the product itself. The Repricer copies that number across the first time the listing shows up. It never writes over a cost that is already there, so a number you correct here stays corrected through every later sync.

A listing matched in the PIM has no cost you can type. Your cost, MAP and MSRP all come down from the matched variant. On the Pricing tab, Unit Cost is a box you cannot type into with Managed by PIM beside it. Click that badge and the variant opens in the PIM in a new tab.

Nothing keeps the cost you replaced. There is one number per listing and no history behind it, so write the old one down if you might want it back.

Which channels get a fee estimate

A marketplace takes a percentage of every order you sell through it, and that percentage can be worked out before the order happens. So there is a number to estimate, and the Repricer estimates it. On a store of your own what comes out of a sale is card processing. That depends on your plan, your payment provider and the card the shopper used, so the Repricer does not guess at it.

Where the column is empty, profit is your price minus your cost. Nothing failed and nothing is missing. Profit on those rows is what you keep before your payment provider takes anything, so it is the best case rather than the final number.

There is no field for a fee anywhere in the Repricer, on any channel. If you know what a sale really costs you, put the difference into the cost.

What is inside a fee estimate

Hover a cell in the Fees column of the listings table and a panel opens headed Fee breakdown. The Referral and Total Fees lines each also show what they come to as a percentage of the price you are charging.

A badge beside that heading reads FBA when the estimate has a fulfillment fee in it and FBM when it does not.

Total Fees can come to more than the rows above it. On eBay you also pay a small fixed fee on every order, and that fee is inside the total without a row of its own.

Reading the profit on one listing

Profit is a column in the listings table, and it is your price, minus the estimated fee, minus your cost. It is worked out while you look at it, so a cost you correct changes the number with no reload.

The color of the number tells you where the listing stands before you read the number itself.

Hover a cell in that column and you get the whole sum: Price, Cost and Fees, then Profit, Margin and ROI, under a heading that reads Profitable, Loss or Break even.

Margin and ROI answer different questions. Margin is your profit as a share of what the shopper pays, so it tells you how much of a sale you keep. ROI is your profit as a share of what you paid, so it tells you how hard your money is working. A cheap item can have a thin margin and a very high ROI at the same time.

The full breakdown on the Insights tab

In the listings table, click any cell that does not open an edit and the listing opens in a dialog over the page. Insights is the third tab across the top of it. Four cards run along the top of that tab reading Profit, Margin, ROI and Fees. Hover any of the four and you get the formula behind it.

Under those four, the card called Margin Analysis takes one sale apart a line at a time.

Open this card when the Profit column gives you a number you did not expect. It shows you which of the lines above is the one taking the money.

Limits

What cost and fees cannot do

What the fee estimate can miss

A fee estimate is a number good enough to price against. It is not your settlement statement, and knowing what it leaves out is what tells you how much room to leave above your cost.

What the estimate covers

It covers the fees a channel charges on the sale itself, at the price the listing was at when the estimate was calculated. On Amazon the figures come from Amazon. On Walmart and eBay the Repricer applies the channel’s published rates for the category the item is in.

That is the whole of it. Every charge below is real money leaving your account and none of it is in the number.

What it leaves out

When something goes wrong

The Profit column is empty

The Fees column is empty

Repricing stopped and the reason is a missing cost

Two things tell you. Repricing Status on the row reads Not working, and hovering that cell gives you a panel headed Repricing Issues with Missing cost price in it. A banner across the top of the app counts every listing in the same state, and the Repricer interface covers what it does.

Only a strategy that builds its floor out of your cost needs one. A strategy with a minimum price you type yourself reprices with no cost at all, so a listing on one of those never shows this. You change which of the two you are on in the price floor and ceiling, and listing and repricing status covers every other reason repricing stops.

A number you do not believe

Where to go next