As you scale your e-commerce business, it can be easy to mistake rising profits for maximized profitability. Not so fast. Just because your bottom line is increasing, doesn’t mean that it is rising as quickly as it could be.
Instead of assuming, there are a number of critical reports you should be monitoring to know just how profitable your e-commerce business really is. The devil is in the details when it comes to e-commerce. There are trends, fluctuations, and outliers lurking across your entire operation that could be costing you money. You’ll never know if you aren’t looking.
Sellercloud is an all-in-one e-commerce growth platform dedicated to making it easy to both generate meaningful reports like these and implement data-driven strategies and workflows in response.
Profit & Loss (P&L) Per Order
In the most basic terms, an order is only profitable if it costs you less than the revenue it generates. In e-commerce, the costs side of the balance sheet includes a number of variables:
- Item costs
- Listing fees
- Marketplace commissions
- Transaction processing fees
- Shipping and handling costs
- Warehousing costs
- Sales tax
These variables will inevitably ebb and flow depending upon the products you sell, where you sell them, industry trends, vendors, and your logistics partners. Regularly tracking these costs and fees is the only way to have a handle on the true profitability of your products and e-commerce business as a whole.
Sudden fluctuations could signal the need to reevaluate areas of your operation like shipping providers, merchandise suppliers, and sales channels. Likewise, notable changes in your sales margins (either positive or negative) may indicate a need to reevaluate your pricing and/or assess the potential effects of market competitors.
Sellerlcoud’s robust P&L reporting features make evaluating your profit margins simple. Our platform puts P&L analysis at your fingertips with the ability to generate reports customized by date range, customer, order, vendor, channel, brand, and more. As a result, you remove the mystery of your e-commerce business’s profitability and unlock ways to further optimize your bottom line.
Profit by Product
When you sell multiple products, each SKU has its own individual impact on your overall profitability. What’s more, each SKU has its own unique lifecycle which dictates its rise and fall as a revenue driver. Tracking P&L on a per-product basis is the only way to truly understand the performance of what you are selling.
Sellercloud’s Profit by Product Summary report makes it possible to do just that. You can isolate the full transaction details for any SKU or group of SKUs in your catalog using filters such as:
- Company
- Channel
- Date range
- Product type
- Vendor
- Manufacturer
- Brand
- Order number
The resulting reports can make it easier to spot trends affecting profitability like purchasing cost fluctuations, seasonality, and SKU maturity.
Profit by Channel
Omnichannel e-commerce has become an industry gold standard. A multi-channel approach to online sales is crucial to maximizing product exposure and brand growth. Just as you need to be sure to understand how effectively each of your products are selling, you need to pay attention to how these profitability figures correlate to the channels where you sell them. In many cases, listing your entire catalog across every channel is not always the key to optimizing conversions.
Sellercloud’s Profit by Order Summary allows sellers to summarize transactions by a number of different variables including channel. Not only does this allow you to surface the P&L metrics associated with the marketplaces and websites where you sell, but you can drill down to target specific product and product group performances on a per-channel basis.
Not all sales channels are created equal. Some products may turn out to be much more popular on particular channels than others. Similarly, some channels may be costing you more in fees and fulfillment costs than others. These P&L disparities can be critical in deciding which products to market where.
Actual Shipping Costs
Most e-commerce brands rely on third-party partners when it comes to receiving merchandise, moving inventory between warehouses, and shipping orders. The associated shipping costs are always subject to change. As such, you need to be actively monitoring your end-to-end shipping costs to ensure that you are using the most reliable and cost-effective shipping options. Even slight savings or price increases can have substantial implications for your bottom line when multiplied out across a high volume of shipments.
As an all-in-one e-commerce platform, Sellercloud makes it possible to track the P&L impact of all of your shipping costs. Not only that, but businesses have the ability to import actual carrier shipping costs from invoices rather than relying on the estimated costs applied at the time an order is placed. This commitment to accuracy means that you have the best possible data to utilize in your carrier-related decision making.
Should you deem it necessary to explore new shipping partnerships, Sellercloud’s integrations with the world’s most popular and reliable shipping providers make it possible to onboard new fulfillment workflows quickly and smoothly.
Inventory Value
One of the easiest elements of profitability to overlook is the carrying costs associated with the merchandise you have yet to sell. To start with, you need to be sure that you have an accurate count of your inventory and stock. A regular inventory cycle-counting protocol can make sure that you are starting from an accurate assessment of what you have and where.
From there, Sellercloud’s Inventory by Warehouse Summary makes it possible to track your inventory value across each location where your merchandise is stored. The valuation method can be adjusted between first-in-first-out (FIFO) or last-in-first-out (LIFO) according to the method that is best suited to your business and products. Additionally, the Unsold Inventory report allows you to tally the costs associated with your stored inventory.
These reports make it possible to not only monitor your inventory turnover ratio, but also allow you to set your ideal buffer inventory and stock levels. You can be sure that you have enough inventory to fulfill orders while also minimizing the costs associated with paying for storage you don’t need.
Getting serious about profitability means getting serious about your e-commerce data. These are just a few of the reporting features available to Sellercloud users that can surface the profitability realities.
Contact us directly for a free demo of how our entire family of tools and products can help you unlock your business’s highest potential.
