Profit, margin and break-even ACOS

The Profitability columns on the Products page show whether a product makes money after its costs and its ads.

Set your cost of goods first

Enter COGS per unit for each SKU in the ASIN Library (a column, in bulk, or in the CSV). The Profitability columns stay hidden until at least one product has COGS. Profit metrics need the Pro plan or above when billing is on.

The formulas

The average price is the SKU's own average selling price in the range.

Example. Average price ₹1,000, referral fee 15%, FBA fee ₹50, COGS ₹400: margin = (1,000 × 0.85 − 400 − 50) ÷ 1,000 = 40%. Selling 5 units: 40% × 1,000 × 5 = ₹2,000. If the SKU spent ₹500 on ads, net profit = ₹1,500. Its break-even ACOS is 40%, so ads costing more than 40% of the ad sales lose money.

Net profit shows a loss equal to the ad cost when a SKU had ad spend, COGS set, and no sales.

Refunds

Refund columns come from Amazon's finance data (the Finances API), refreshed every few hours; the Products page footnote says the day they are loaded through. Refunds are counted on the day Amazon posted the refund, whatever day the order was placed, so they match Amazon's payments and a past day never changes after the fact.

• Refunds is the product price handed back to the buyer. Tax is left out, because it was never your money.
• Refund rate divides refunded units by units ordered in the same range. Refunds can belong to earlier sales, so read it over a long range (a month or more) rather than a few days.
• A refund Amazon first holds as deferred and releases later is counted once, on the earlier day.
• The refund columns need the Finance and Accounting role on your Selling Partner authorization. If a store never gets refund data, reconnect Seller Central from Settings.

Returns

Returns come from Amazon's merchant-fulfilled returns report and load on their own: the last 4 weeks refresh every day (a return's status and outcome change after it is filed), older weeks load once, going back about 180 days. Nothing to upload.

• A return is counted on the day it was requested, whatever day the order was placed, so Return rate (returned units ÷ units ordered in the same range) is a period rate: read it over a month or more.
• Returns are not refunds. A return can end in a replacement: the customer gets a new unit and nothing is refunded. Open a SKU on the Products page to see its return reasons and how many returned units were replaced.
• Reasons are Amazon's own (defective, missing parts, not as described, unwanted item, damaged by carrier, and so on). Customer names, addresses, tracking numbers and item names are never stored.
• FBA returns are not included here; they are a different Amazon report.

The clock icon

Fees come from Amazon's fee estimates, fetched automatically. A clock icon means the estimate is not known yet (still loading, Amazon denied access to fee estimates, or none exists). Until then fees count as zero, so the margin and net profit can look better than they are. Treat them as an upper bound. Colours: green above 10% margin, amber 0 to 10%, red below 0%.

Where it is used

• Keyword Performance uses break-even ACOS to cap bid raises for a store that advertises a single product, and only when fees are known. See Keyword Performance.