Analytics · Profitability & COGS
Upload your unit costs from a pre-filled spreadsheet, or set them one SKU at a time, and Sellerbud applies the cost that was in force on each order’s date rather than today’s. Gross profit, gross profit % and a month-end P&L that adds up then sit alongside revenue on the breakdowns you already read. SKUs you have not costed yet fall back to a default percentage you control, so no row is ever blank.
Six things have to be true before a margin number is worth trusting: real costs, dated costs, costs on every SKU, every Amazon deduction, your ad spend, and a total that reconciles. Here is each one.
Open any product row and the Proceeds column reads top to bottom: net revenue after returns, then gross expenses — Amazon’s fees, the non-fee deductions, your ad spend — and then gross profit, with your cost of goods nested beneath it, closing on gross profit %. Every line carries the prior period beside it, so you are not comparing a number to your memory of it.
Set a unit cost inline and Sellerbud records it rather than overwriting it. The first cost you ever enter is backdated so historical orders can find one; every later edit lands on its own date. When the pipeline costs an order it takes the cost that was in force on that order’s date — so re-costing a SKU in June never quietly rewrites March.
Download the template and it arrives already filled with every SKU’s identifiers, title, selling price and current cost, plus one blank column to type into. Upload it back and only the rows you filled are applied. The result tells you exactly what happened: updated, skipped blank, skipped unchanged, invalid — with the reason on every rejected row.
Costing a catalogue takes a while, and margin should not wait for it. Each marketplace carries a default cost percentage — seeded at 35, yours to change between 1 and 100 — and any SKU without a recorded cost is costed from its selling price at that rate. The settings grid labels those rows, so an estimate never passes itself off as a measurement.
Gross Profit is a first-class sort field, not a column you have to export and re-rank. Flip the sort ascending and the products that look strongest on the revenue leaderboard rearrange themselves — the heavily-advertised hero SKU whose margin the ads ate, the high-return line that never recovers its cost. Same view, by ASIN, SKU, parent SKU or category.
When a month closes it becomes a single column: gross revenue, then returns, cost of goods, fees, shipping, ad spend and misc expenses, then net profit and net profit %. The total is recomputed from the components rather than read from a stored figure, so the column always reconciles — and a negative one is shown in red rather than rounded away.
Worked example
One product, one closed month, three views of the same orders. Illustrative figures — the arithmetic is the product’s, the numbers are an example.
One of the month’s biggest SKUs by revenue, and revenue up 11% on the prior period. Nothing here says stop.
Referral and fulfilment fees plus the non-fee deductions, exactly as they landed on the settled orders.
The two lines a revenue dashboard never shows you. Returned units carry no cost of goods, which is why COGS covers 463 units, not 520.
Gross profit on the month: ₹381. Net profit: −₹21,019 — −1.8% of gross revenue. The SKU was not a winner — it was a very busy way to lose money, and the only view that says so is the one with your costs in it.
Objections
One spreadsheet, usually. The template downloads pre-filled with every SKU in the marketplace — sku, asin, title, selling price and the cost currently on record — leaving one blank column for the new cost. Fill the rows you know, upload it back, and only the non-blank rows are applied; the rest are reported as skipped. You can also set costs one SKU at a time from the grid, and anything you never get to is costed at your default percentage in the meantime.
Sellerbud reads what Amazon actually charged on settled orders rather than estimating from a fee schedule. Close a month and the P&L column subtracts six things from gross revenue, in this order: return value, cost of goods, fees, shipping, ad spend and misc expenses. Shipping is not an extra charge on top of the fees — it is Amazon’s non-fee deductions under the label the P&L uses, and the performance breakdown calls the same figure Non-Fees Expenses. One deduction, two labels, never counted twice. Cost of goods is the one line Amazon cannot tell you; that is the part you supply. One honest consequence: profit is settlement-gated. An order line that has not settled yet contributes zero cost of goods and zero gross proceeds, so this is a settled-orders number, not a today number.
Spend sits inside gross expenses, so it is subtracted before gross profit rather than shown alongside it as a separate concern. It is attributed at the same grain you are looking at — ASIN, SKU, parent SKU, category or tag — and the entity strip carries TACOS beside return rate, so you can see when advertising is the thing eating the margin rather than guessing.
Return value is its own line and is subtracted from revenue before anything else happens, and return rate sits on the entity strip in the breakdown. A returned line is assigned no cost of goods — Sellerbud does not pretend the unit was consumed, and it does not pretend the cost was recovered either. It simply is not charged against that order.
No. Costs are point-in-time. Each order is costed with the cost row that was in force on that order’s date, so a June re-cost changes June forward and leaves March exactly as it was reported. The cost book is append-only — an edit adds a dated row, it never destroys the old one, and the full history is visible per SKU with the source of each entry.
A free marketplace can browse its cost list, download the template and read a SKU’s cost history, and the performance surfaces themselves are part of the free floor — refreshed on a 30-day cadence, with a banner saying so. Setting your own costs — inline, in bulk, or changing the default percentage — is part of Analytics. Until then margin is computed at the default percentage rather than at nothing.
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