How to calculate your true cost per item
The price on the item isn't what it cost you. Shipping, fees and tax spread across the haul, and skipping that is the most common way resellers overstate their margin.
Buy five items for $40 plus $8 shipping, and no single item cost $8. Each one carries its own price plus a slice of that $8. Skip the slice and every margin you report after that is off by however much you left out.
Tax works the same way, split across the items it applied to. Discounts work the other direction: a $10 discount lowers the pool before you split it, not something you subtract per item afterward.
One item from that haul
- Item price
- $8.00
- Share of shipping ($8 ÷ 5 items)
- + $1.60
- Share of tax
- + $0.50
- True cost
- $10.10
Watch the item that's genuinely free, bundled in or paid $0. It should carry $0 landed cost, not an even split of the rest. Spread shipping evenly across a mix of paid and free items and the free one still pulls a share, quietly overstating what everything else actually cost.
Doing this by hand once is fine. Doing it every haul is where people stop bothering and just eyeball the number instead. More on working out real profit.
Photograph the receipt, skip the math.
ItemLogue splits shipping, fees and tax across the items automatically, per haul.
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