See Which Sales Actually Made Money — and When the Number Is a Guess

You already know what sold last month. Your Sales Report has been telling you revenue, units, and orders for a long time. What it could not tell you was which of those sales were worth making. A product can top your revenue chart and still lose money once you account for what it cost to buy and what the marketplace kept in fees.

Profit ($) and Margin (%) are now two metrics in the Sales Report Builder, alongside Revenue, Units Sold, Orders, and Average Order Value. You will find them at Reports › Sales Report › Metrics.

The Number, or an Honest Reason There Isn’t One

Most profitability tools show you a confident figure whether or not the inputs behind it exist. If you have not entered your product costs, they estimate, round, or quietly assume — and you have no way to tell a measured number from a fabricated one.

This works differently. The report tracks how much of each figure rests on data you actually recorded, and it tells you on screen:

• If you have entered no costs at all, the Profit column shows an Add costs link and the Margin column reads No cost. You do not get a made-up number dressed up as insight.
• If some costs are missing, the figure appears with a warning icon, and the tooltip tells you how many units are uncosted and that profit is overstated.
• If marketplace fees have only settled for part of your revenue, the tooltip tells you what share was estimated from your store’s historical rate.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Marketplace settlement lags the sale, so your most recent orders often have no fee data yet. Revenue whose fees have actually arrived is charged what it really cost; only the remainder is charged your blended historical rate. Without that split, last week would always look wildly profitable and then quietly correct itself later.

What You Need to Do First

The honest cost of entry is that profit and margin only work once your product costs are in the system. There are three ways to get them there:

1. The Cost column on Manage Pricing — click a cell to edit it.
2. Pricing › Cost Settings › Product Costs — search by SKU.
3. The Add costs link that appears anywhere a figure is missing its cost.

There is no bulk cost import, so plan for this to take a pass through your catalog. You can optionally add overhead at Pricing › Cost Settings › Overhead Costs — each item has a name, an amount, and a type of Per Order or Per Unit. Only per-unit costs reach the Sales Report. If you sell through a cart platform, you can also configure payment processor fees per integration.

One practical note: the person who knows your product costs is often not the person who can see them here. Cost data is billing data, so profit, margin, and Cost Settings all require the view billing permission. Entering costs may need a little coordination on your team. There is no plan tier or feature flag involved — if you have billing access, you already have the feature.

What This Margin Includes, and What It Does Not

The margin here is contribution margin: revenue less variable costs. It sits between gross margin and net margin, and it is deliberately scoped. Every profit and margin tooltip ends with the same sentence:

Excludes advertising spend, per-order overhead and shipping, so this will not match the profit column on View Orders.

Advertising comes first for a reason. Listing Mirror holds no advertising data, so ad spend is not subtracted here. Helium 10’s Profits and Sellerboard both remove PPC before showing a column they call Margin, which means our margin will read higher than theirs on the same business. That is not a better result — it is a different, narrower calculation, and you should read it that way.

For the same reason, this profit will not reconcile with the Profit column on View Orders. That is by design: View Orders includes per-order overhead and shipping; the Sales Report excludes them. Two different figures, answering two different questions.

Because They Are Metrics, They Inherit Everything

Profit and margin are not a separate screen, so they plug into the whole report builder. Group by Date, Channel, Store, SKU, Product, Brand, Category, Color, or Size. Sort by profit or margin — the sort runs in the database, so page one of a worst-margin report really is your worst rows, not the worst of an arbitrary first hundred. Chart them, including on a dual axis with profit as currency and margin as a percentage. Save the report, drop it on your dashboard, or export it to CSV.

Two ready-made reports ship with the feature:

Most Profitable Products

Rank products by the profit they actually generate, not the revenue they bring in. Requires product costs to be recorded — the report will prompt for any that are missing.

Margin by Channel

Compare profit margin across marketplaces to see which channels keep the most of each sale after selling fees.

A Few Limits Worth Knowing

• Refunds and returns are not accounted for — a refunded order still counts its full revenue and profit. Cancelled and unpaid orders are excluded.
• Sales Report data is as of yesterday, not real-time; the rollup runs nightly.
• Costs have no history, so changing a SKU’s cost changes its past figures too.
• CSV export stops at 5,000 rows.
• Profit and margin cannot be grouped by state or country.

Knowing these up front is the point of the whole design.

Turn It On

Go to Reports › Sales Report › Metrics and add Profit and Margin to a report. If the columns tell you to add costs, follow the link — or enter them at Pricing › Cost Settings › Product Costs. The report will be honest with you about what it knows and what it is estimating; the more costs you record, the more of it is measured rather than guessed.

New to Listing Mirror? Create an account or schedule a demo to see profit and margin in the Sales Report Builder for yourself.