Profitability report

What your listings are making after cost and fees, how the margins are spread across your catalog, and which listings are the thinnest ones.

The profitability report tells you what one sale would leave you, on every listing you have given a cost to. It takes the price you are asking, subtracts what the item costs you, and subtracts the fee the channel takes out of a sale. What is left is your profit, and you get it as money and as a percentage.

Most people open it for one of two reasons. One is to find out whether your prices are leaving you enough. The other is to get the list of the listings that are barely making anything, so you know which ones to work on.

You get eight figures at the top, four bars showing how your margins are spread, a table of your days and a table with one row per listing. Almost all of it describes the prices you are asking right now. Only the table of days counts orders you actually took.

Click Reports in the sidebar down the left, then click Profit, the second of the six cards. Your report opens in a dialog over the screen, headed Profitability Report. Nothing in it changes a price or a listing, so you can open it and click around freely.

Before you start

What your role lets you do

Every role reads every number in this report, and nothing here is above your level. Nothing here changes a price, a listing or a strategy either.

What your role decides is whether you can put a listing into the report. A listing counts here once it has a cost on it, and typing a cost needs Editor. Roles are set in team, roles and permissions.

A listing with no cost is left out

Without a cost there is no profit to calculate. A listing with nothing in the Cost column of your listings table is in none of the figures you see here, and nothing on the screen tells you it was left out.

An organization where nobody has filled a cost in opens this report with 0 on all eight figures and an empty table at the bottom. Fill a cost in and that listing is counted the next time you open the report. Cost, fees and profit covers where a cost comes from and how to fill in a lot of them at once.

How to read this report

1. 1

   Open the report

   Click Reports in the sidebar down the left. You get six cards. Click Profit, the second one, and your report opens in a dialog over the screen.

2. 2

   Read the figures at the top

   Overview is the heading at the top of the dialog, with eight figures under it. Hover the small info icon beside any of them and you get a sentence saying what that figure counts.

3. 3

   See how your margins are spread

   Margin Distribution is the panel under those figures. It splits your listings into four margin ranges, and the first one, Negative (<0%), counts the listings you lose money on.

4. 4

   Read what your selling came to

   Daily Profitability is the table in the middle of the dialog, one row per day. The dropdown reading Last 30 days, in the bar across the top of the dialog, is what decides which days you get.

5. 5

   Bring your thinnest listings to the top

   By Listing is the table at the bottom, and it opens with your best margin first. Click the Margin column header once and the order flips, so the listings making you the least come up to the top.

That is the whole report. Close the dialog with the × at the top of it, with the Escape key, or by clicking outside it, and you come back to your six cards.

Everything below explains one piece at a time. The one part worth reading anyway is what the figures at the top are counting, which is further down this page.

Every option in detail

You get four parts, in this order down the dialog: Overview, Margin Distribution, Daily Profitability and By Listing. The sections below follow them in that order.

The date range and the Integration, Account and Region dropdowns are in the bar across the top of the dialog. The three dropdowns narrow all four parts at once. The date range moves Daily Profitability and nothing else. Reports covers what each of them does.

The eight figures at the top

Overview is the heading at the top of the report dialog, with eight figures under it. Each one is a label, a number and a small info icon. Hover the icon and you get a sentence saying what that figure counts and the sum behind it.

Avg. Margin and Profit Margin answer the same question two ways. Avg. Margin gives every listing an equal say, so a cheap listing counts as much as an expensive one. Profit Margin divides one total by another, so your expensive listings pull it. When those two are far apart, your cheap items and your expensive ones are priced very differently, and By Listing at the bottom of the dialog is where you see it.

Profitable is a pair of counts, and the second one is not your catalog. It is how many of your listings have a cost. So 125 of 200 in an organization with 900 listings means 700 of them are in none of this report.

Avg. Profit/Unit is per listing and not per unit sold, whatever the label says. It is Est. Profit divided by the number of listings counted, so it tells you what a typical listing of yours makes on one sale. Selling more of anything does not move it.

On a narrow screen the three money figures are shortened to fit, so they read as a rounded figure with a K or an M on the end. Widen the dialog and you get the exact figure back.

How your margins are spread

Margin Distribution is the panel in the report dialog, under the eight figures at the top. It splits every counted listing into four margin ranges and draws one bar for each. Every bar tells you how many listings are in that range and what share of the report they are.

The four bars add up to every listing in the report, and the length of a bar tells you that range’s share of them. So a long Low bar beside a short High one is a catalog priced thin, whatever the average above it says.

Start with Negative. Every listing in that bar is one you pay to sell at the price it is at today. Anything above 0 there is worth your time, and a floor built out of your cost is what stops it coming back, which the price floor and ceiling covers.

The bars give you counts and not SKUs. To see which listings are behind one, use By Listing at the bottom of the dialog and sort it by Margin.

Reading the daily profitability table

Daily Profitability is the table in the middle of the report dialog, under the bars. One row is one day of your date range, newest first.

This is the only part of the report your date range moves. The dropdown reading Last 30 days is in the bar across the top of the dialog. Open it and pick another period, or pick two dates of your own on the calendar beside that list. The eight figures above and the four bars stay exactly where they were.

This table has no pages. Every day in your range is on screen at once, so a long range gives you a long table. The days you sold nothing are in it too, and they read 0 all the way across. Click any column header to sort by that column instead of by date. Above the rows is the same toolbar every table in the Repricer gives you, with Search, Columns, Filter and Density on it.

Margin and ROI read the same on every day that sold anything. That is not a fault, and the reason is further down this page.

Every column in the by-listing table

By Listing is the table at the bottom of the report dialog. One row is one of your counted listings, and every column is showing when you arrive.

Your table opens with your best margin first. Click the Margin column header once and the order flips, so your thinnest listings come to the top. Every one of the eight columns sorts, in both directions, over all your counted listings and not only the page you are on.

The money columns are rounded to whole units. A price of 29.99 reads USD$30 here and a profit of 4.50 reads USD$5. Margin and ROI keep a decimal, so read those two when the rounding hides the difference you came for.

Above the rows is the toolbar the other tables give you, with Search, Columns and Density on it and no Filter button. Search looks in SKU and Product Title, and it searches every counted listing, so a SKU that is not on the page you are looking at still comes up. The table opens on 25 rows a page, and 25, 50 and 100 are your choices in the footer under it.

A row is only as fresh as the fee estimate behind it, since the profit on it is your price minus your cost minus that estimate. Cost, fees and profit covers when a new estimate is calculated.

Limits

What this report cannot do

What the numbers count

Which of your listings are counted

One test decides it. The listing has a cost above 0, and everything else about it is beside the point.

• Every channel counts, a marketplace or a store of your own.
• Every listing status counts. A listing that is Inactive on the channel is still in your average margin if it has a cost.
• Stock is not looked at. A listing you have none of counts the same as one you have a hundred of.

That is why the second number in Profitable is the number of listings you have given a cost to. It is not how many listings you have, and the gap between the two is usually large on a catalog nobody has costed yet.

Clearing a cost takes that listing back out. Setting one to 0 does the same, because this report reads a 0 as no cost at all.

Why the figures at the top are not about what you sold

Every figure under Overview, at the top of the report dialog, comes from one unit of each counted listing at the price it is at today. So does every bar under those figures. Nothing up there counts an order.

So Est. Profit is what you would make by selling exactly one of every counted listing right now. It is not what you made last month, and a good week does not move it. What moves it is a price change, a cost you edit, a fresh fee estimate, or a listing arriving.

That is also why your date range leaves those figures alone. A price you are asking has no day attached to it. You can see which of the six reports your date range moves in reports.

Two of those tooltips use the word revenue. Fee Rate and Profit Margin both divide by a total revenue, and here that means your prices added up, one unit per listing. On the sales report the figure called Total Revenue is what your orders came to. Two numbers, one word, and only one of them is money you took.

Where the daily profit comes from

Revenue and Orders in Daily Profitability, the table in the middle of the report dialog, are real. They are the same figures the sales report gives you for the same days, read out of your seller accounts.

The other three columns are calculated from them. Each day’s Profit is that day’s revenue multiplied by the Profit Margin figure at the top of the report. Margin repeats that same figure with a decimal on it, and ROI repeats the ROI figure from the top, on every day that sold anything.

That is why you get the same two figures on every row. The report knows what your selling came to each day in money, and it does not know which items went out. So it treats every day as if it sold your catalog’s average margin.

Read the daily table for the shape of your selling, and read the figures above it for where your prices stand. A day of selling your thinnest listings and a day of selling your best ones read the same margin here.

Which currency each number is in

The eight figures at the top of the report dialog, and the money in Daily Profitability under them, are in your organization’s currency. They are converted for you at today’s rate.

By Listing is the exception. Every amount on those rows is in the currency that listing sells in, with the code in front of it. So USD$30 and MXN$499 turn up one row under the other. That is a price you might go and change, so you get it the way you would type it. Reports covers where your organization’s currency is set.

When something goes wrong

Every figure at the top reads 0

The daily table is what tells the first two apart from a quiet month. Revenue on those rows with no profit beside it means the report found no costs to work with.

Costs are what this report runs on. You fill them in from Listings in the sidebar down the left, which cost, fees and profit covers.

A listing you expected is not in the table

The usual reason is the cost. Click Listings in the sidebar down the left, find the row, and read the Cost column on it. An empty cell keeps that listing out of this report, and so does a 0.

The other reason is your scope. Integration, Account and Region, in the bar across the top of the report dialog, each leave listings out. Set all three back to All before you go looking for the cost.

A row shows a price of 0 and a large loss

That listing has a cost and the channel has not given Repricer a price for it yet. In By Listing, the table at the bottom of the report dialog, Price reads 0 on that row. Profit reads your cost and your fees with a minus sign in front, and Margin reads 0.0% instead of a negative number.

Nothing is wrong with the listing and there is nothing for you to fix. The row is right again once the price comes in, which what Repricer reads covers.

The report will not load

Every message you can get here comes with a Retry button under it, and reports lists them with what to do about each. The one you are most likely to meet is the timeout, because this report reads every listing you have given a cost to. Set Integration, in the bar across the top of the dialog, to one of yours and try again.

Where to go next