Cost of Goods (COG) is your best estimation of what it costs to deliver each product. In ManageByStats there exists a provision for adding these COGs, and there are a few ways to do so.
Amazon sales data is pulled directly from Amazon. Amazon, however, has no “cost” information. How much does it cost to make your product? How much to ship it? ManageByStats is dedicated Amazon business software, so from the beginning the question became, How to include these product costs in the stats calculations?
The solution: the Cost and Inbound Shipping/unit fields. In ManageByStats you can find these fields under Settings | SKUs. Here’s a link to the Help page for that section, which has a graphical breakdown of the feature:
managebystats.com/knowledge-base/skus
There are three basic ways to enter cost of goods:
- Save
- Save + 0
- Save + All
Each accomplishes a different goal.
“Save” saves the value you’ve entered and applies that value for all transactions going forward. This you would use when you change a cost setting for a product but you want to save all previous cost settings.
“Save + 0” saves the value you’ve entered and also replaces any prior value of zero. This updates any prior transaction where the cost of the SKU is set to “0”, and is what you would commonly use when new to ManageByStats, and no previous costs have been entered yet.
“Save + All” saves the cost to the SKU and also updates all transactions in the history of the SKU, overriding any previously set cost. So, this one you have to pay attention to. Using this version will override all previous cost entries for that product.
Each Amazon seller has different needs. Depending on those needs one of the above options will be the best for entering Costs. Don’t want to see your Costs applied to past transactions? Simply choose Save. If you want to update any past transactions for that SKU (where no Cost exists), the best way to do that is Save + 0. Finally, if you want to apply the cost for all transactions for all time, overriding all previous entries, choose Save + All.
Selling on Amazon brings its own unique challenges and rewards. With the Costs fields in ManageByStats you have one more tool to manage your Amazon business.
