Track profit with product costs

Record what each product costs you and turn revenue reporting into profit reporting — gross profit, margin, and which products actually make money.

Revenue tells you how much money moved. Profit tells you whether the business works. The difference is one number you have to supply: what each product costs you.

Enter it once per product and YNS works out gross profit, margin, and per-product profitability for you — including the uncomfortable answer to "which of my best sellers barely makes anything?"

Enter your costs

Cost lives on the variant, next to its price:

  1. Open a product and go to its variants.
  2. Fill in Cost per item for each one.

It's what you pay per unit, excluding tax — the invoice price from your supplier, or what it costs you to make one. Enter it in your store's currency.

Note: Cost is for your reporting only. It's never shown to customers, never sent to your storefront, and never returned by the public API. Nobody outside your team can see what you paid.

Costs on many products at once

Cost is a column in the product spreadsheet, so you don't have to do this one product at a time. Export your products, fill in the cost column, and import the file back — see Import products in bulk. A blank cell just leaves that variant's cost unset.

What you get back

Add these widgets to your Analytics page (Customize → Add widget):

WidgetWhat it shows
Gross ProfitNet revenue minus the cost of what you sold, with your margin percentage
Sales BreakdownGross sales walked down to net through discounts, shipping, and refunds
Top ProductsNow with profit per product, not just revenue

Costs are frozen at the moment of sale

When an order is placed, the cost of each item is stored on that order. Change a supplier price next month and your past months don't move — profit history stays a record of what actually happened, not a recalculation against today's prices.

The practical consequence: update a cost when it genuinely changes, and it takes effect from the next order. It won't rewrite the past, which is exactly what you want at year end.

Partial costs are shown as partial

If only some of what you sold has a cost recorded, the Gross Profit widget says so — it reports cost coverage, the share of sold units with a known cost, and warns you that profit and margin read higher than reality until the rest are filled in.

This is deliberate. A missing cost is not a zero cost, and a store that has costed 20% of its catalog should not be shown a 90% margin as if it were real.

Tip: Chase coverage, not perfection. Cost your top twenty sellers and you'll have a profit figure worth acting on; the long tail can wait.

Reading the numbers

  • Margin, not revenue, is the number to optimize. A product doing €10,000 at 8% is worth less to you than one doing €4,000 at 40%.
  • Compare margin against the effort. Heavy, fragile, or high-return products cost more than their unit cost suggests.
  • Watch discounts against margin. A 20% coupon on a 25% margin product hands nearly all the profit away.

FAQ

Does cost include shipping, duty, or packaging?

Whatever you enter is what's used. Most merchants enter their landed cost — the supplier price plus what it took to get the unit into their hands. Be consistent across products, or your margins won't be comparable.

Should I enter cost with or without tax?

Without. Enter the net cost, excluding any recoverable tax.

Can customers or my API see the cost?

No. It's stripped from storefront responses and public product data. It exists only in your admin and your reporting.

I changed a cost and my old profit figures didn't move.

Correct — that's by design. Orders keep the cost they were placed with. New orders use the new figure.

My margin looks impossibly high.

Almost always missing costs. Check the coverage figure on the Gross Profit widget: units without a cost count as revenue with nothing subtracted.

What's next