Set up profit tracking
Enter your purchase prices, check they cover your catalog and read your net margin after product costs and advertising.
Your revenue tells you how much you sold. It does not tell you how much you keep. To find out, Fullmetrix needs the purchase price of your products. It then combines it with your sales excluding tax and your ad spend to calculate your margin.
This tutorial walks you through a first setup. Every screen is described in full in the Margin section.
Two words of vocabulary
The purchase price is what one unit of a product costs you, whether you buy it from a supplier or make it yourself. It is neither your sale price nor the value of your stock.
Gross margin is what remains of your sales excluding tax once the purchase price of the products sold is removed. Net margin, in Fullmetrix, also removes your ad spend.
Before you start
Wait for your store import to finish. Prepare the list of your purchase prices, variants included, and check whether they are excluding tax or including tax. If you advertise, connect your ad platforms in Settings, Integrations tab, so their spend is included in the calculation.
Open the Product costs page
In the sidebar, under Data, expand Margin and click Product costs.
The Purchase price per product page lists all your products and their variants. Above the table, the counter shows how many items already have a price, for example "120 / 450 items priced".
Enter a few prices by hand
Use the Search a product or a SKU field to find a product. Click the Purchase price column of its row, where To fill in shows, type the price and press Enter. The price is saved as soon as you leave the field.
On this page, prices are shown including tax, as the text under the title reminds you. The Margin and Margin rate columns update right away from the Sale price.
Start with your best sellers. Click a column header to sort the table.
Import the rest with a CSV file
For a large catalog, click Import a CSV. The wizard has three steps.
- File. Download the prefilled template, whose button shows how many items you have (for example Template with my 450 items), or a Blank template. The prefilled template already contains your references and product names. Fill in the purchase price column in your spreadsheet, save as CSV, then drop the file into the window or click Browse. Only CSV files are accepted. If the File too large. message appears, split your file into several parts.
- Mapping. For each column of your file, choose Product reference (SKU or id), Purchase price or Skip. In Prices entered, say whether the prices in your file are Excl. tax or Incl. tax. With Incl. tax, a VAT (%) field appears, set to 20 by default. Click Run import.
- Result. Fullmetrix shows the number of Prices updated, Unknown items and Unreadable values, with the list of references it could not find.
An unknown reference is not applied to any product. Fix it in your file, often an extra space or an old reference, then run the import again. The detailed guide is in Product costs.
Check the coverage
Go back to the items priced counter. As long as some items have no price, the margin of those products is overstated, because their cost counts as zero.
If your store already sends a cost price for some products, Fullmetrix uses it for the items you have not filled in. A price entered in Fullmetrix always takes priority.
If you cannot cover everything right away, start with the products that make most of your revenue. You find them in E-commerce, then Top sellers.
Read your margin
In the sidebar, under Margin, click Overview. Pick a finished period with the period button.
The four cards at the top sum up the period.
| Card | Calculation |
|---|---|
| Revenue excl. tax | Your sales in the period, excluding tax |
| Total costs | The purchase price excluding tax of the products sold, plus your ad spend |
| Net margin | Revenue excluding tax minus total costs |
| Net margin rate | Net margin divided by revenue excluding tax |
The What each day leaves you chart shows, bar by bar, the share of product cost, advertising and net margin. The Day, Week and Month buttons change the size of the bars. Where your money goes ranks your cost lines from heaviest to lightest. How far down we can go explains that gross margin is exact product by product, while advertising is only attributed at the channel level.
What the calculation leaves out
The Fullmetrix net margin removes the purchase price of products and the spend of connected ad platforms (Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads and ChatGPT Ads). It does not remove shipping costs, payment fees, salaries, rent, storage or returns. Keep this in mind before comparing this number with your accounting result.
Keep your margin reliable over time
- Update your purchase prices when your supplier changes its rates.
- Fill in every variant sold, not only the parent product.
- After adding new products to your store, download the CSV template again to get the new references.
- Check that all your active ad platforms are connected.
- When a margin is negative, open the details instead of hiding it in an average.
Frequently asked questions
Going further
The Margin section describes the overview and the Product costs page in detail. You have finished the getting started path. Continue with Using reports to master the controls shared by every report.