Margin
Read what you keep after buying the products and paying for ads, understand each margin indicator and where the costs come from.
The Margin section shows what you keep once the products sold and the advertising are paid for, a figure revenue alone does not give you. It has two pages. Overview shows your margin over a period. Product costs is where you enter the purchase price of each product.
This page describes the Overview. If you are starting from scratch, follow the Set up profit tracking tutorial first, which walks you through it step by step.
Overview
Revenue excluding tax, costs, net margin and net margin rate over the chosen period.
Product costs
The purchase price of each product and variant, entered by hand or imported from a CSV file.
Before you start
The section appears in the sidebar as soon as a store is connected. Two things must be in place for it to show an accurate margin.
Your products need a purchase price. Some stores already send a cost (the wholesale price in PrestaShop or the cost per item in Shopify, for example). For the other products, you enter it in Product costs. A product sold without a purchase price counts as zero cost, and the margin is then overstated.
Your ad platforms must be connected if you want a margin after advertising. Fullmetrix reads the spend from Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads and ChatGPT Ads. With no ad platform connected, advertising is zero.
Open the Overview
In the sidebar, open Data, then Margin, then click Overview.
At the top right, the date range picker sets the window you study. By default, it covers the last 30 days up to yesterday, and the period is shared with the e-commerce reports. If you turn on Compare, each card shows the change against the previous period or the previous year. See Date range and comparison.
The page has no store selector. It uses the stores you picked in the All sources selector of the e-commerce reports.
The four indicators
| Card | Definition |
|---|---|
| Revenue excl. tax | Your net sales for the period, the same as in the Revenue report. They are computed with the Net sales deductions of your report settings. Check which boxes are ticked in Settings, Reports tab. |
| Total costs | The cost of the products sold plus the ad spend for the period. A drop in this figure shows in green. |
| Net margin | Revenue excl. tax minus the cost of the products sold, minus advertising. |
| Net margin rate | Net margin divided by revenue excl. tax, as a percentage. |
Each card shows a small chart of the last 14 points of the main chart. When comparison is on, it also shows the change as a percentage and the value of the previous period.
Excluding tax only if taxes are deducted
Revenue excl. tax follows your report settings. If you turn off Deduct taxes in Settings, Reports tab, this figure includes VAT and the margin is overstated by the same amount. Keep this option on to read an accurate margin.
Where the costs come from
Cost of the products sold
Fullmetrix counts the units sold of each product over the period, then multiplies them by their purchase price excluding tax. Units sold follow the same rules as your product reports. Orders with excluded statuses and orders from ignored customers do not count. If Exclude refunded orders from product reports is on, refunded orders do not count either.
The purchase price of each product comes from three sources, in this order.
- The price you entered or imported in Product costs. It always wins.
- For a variant with no price entered, the price entered on its parent product.
- Otherwise, the purchase cost sent by your store, if there is one.
Prices entered in Product costs include tax. To bring them back to excluding tax, Fullmetrix divides them by the average VAT rate of your sales over the period, computed from the taxes actually charged. With an average VAT of 20%, a purchase price entered as €12 including tax counts as €10 excluding tax.
A product sold without any purchase price counts as zero. The cost of products is then too low and the margin too high. The coverage line on the Product costs page tells you how many items still have no price.
Advertising
Fullmetrix adds up, day by day, the spend of every Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads and ChatGPT Ads account connected to your organization. This spend does not depend on the selected stores. The amounts are added as the ad platforms send them, with no currency conversion. Check that your ad accounts use the same currency as your store.
What is not counted
The Fullmetrix margin removes the cost of goods and advertising. It does not remove the shipping you pay to carriers, payment fees, salaries, storage or other overheads. Keep this in mind before comparing this figure with your accounting result.
The What each day leaves you chart
Each bar is one day of sales excluding tax. It is split into three colors, Product cost at the bottom, Advertising in the middle and Net margin at the top. The total height matches the day's revenue excl. tax, as long as the margin is positive. On a day when advertising is more than what is left after buying the products, the Net margin part drops below the axis.
The Day, Week and Month buttons change the grouping. By week, a bar covers one week, and the tooltip shows "Week of" followed by the date of the first day. Hover a bar to read the three amounts.
The Where your money goes block
This block lists the two cost lines, Product cost then Advertising, with their amount and their share of revenue excl. tax. The last line gives the Net margin and the net margin rate. The Configure button opens the Product costs page.
For example, with €10,000 of revenue excl. tax, €4,000 of products and €2,500 of advertising, you read Product cost €4,000 (40%), Advertising €2,500 (25%) and Net margin €3,500 (35%).
The How far down we can go block
This block starts with a bar that splits your revenue excl. tax across the three colors of the chart. It then details two levels of margin.
| Level | Calculation | Precision |
|---|---|---|
| Gross margin | Revenue excl. tax minus the cost of the products sold. | Per product. Each purchase price is tied to an item sold, so this level is exact down to the product. |
| Net margin | Gross margin minus advertising. | Per channel. Ad spend belongs to a campaign, so to a channel. Fullmetrix does not split it across products, because that would depend on an attribution model. |
Each level shows its amount and its percentage of revenue excl. tax.
Example questions
- How much did I keep last month, ads paid? Pick the month and read Net margin.
- Is my margin improving? Turn on Compare with the previous year and read the trend of Net margin rate.
- On which days did advertising cost more than it brought in? Look for bars whose Net margin part drops below zero.
- What share of my revenue goes into buying stock? Read the Product cost percentage in Where your money goes.