Cost Settings
Where you tell the app what your business costs. Nothing else in Profit Analytics is true until you do.
What this unlocks
Fill this in and the profit the app reports becomes your profit, instead of your sales with a few things taken off.
Shopify Profit, Overall P&L, Amazon P&L and Custom Expenses Analytics all read their costs from here. None of them can show you a number you have not given them.
Five panels, one open at a time, each holding a cost the app cannot work out on its own. Three of them carry a chip in the header — Added or Not added — and that chip is the whole status of your profit reporting in one word.
It needs a single store. With an organisation selected the page shows "Costs Settings are not available for organizations" and nothing else.
What it costs you to skip
A cost you leave out is not treated as unknown. It is treated as zero, and the profit you report is too high by exactly that much.
Nothing errors, nothing turns red, and every number gets more flattering.
Here is exactly what goes wrong, panel by panel:
The Amazon side is the only one that tells you. A red line above the Amazon P&L tables counts the products missing a cost. Shipping, gateway and custom expenses fail silently.
Fill it in, in this order
Every panel you finish takes one cost off zero and moves reported profit closer to what your bank balance does. Work down them the way the page presents them.
1. Cost of Goods - Amazon
Pick the account at the top if you sell on more than one, then use Filter by SKU or item name to find a product.
The table shows Product Name, SKU, ASIN 1, Status and COGS. Click the edit icon in the COGS cell to enter the unit cost, and to keep a dated history of it.
The panel header tells you where you stand: All active products have COGS, or a count of how many are still missing.
2. Cost of Goods - Shopify
Nothing to do here. The panel says "Directly Imported from Shopify product variants. Add or edit your COGS in shopify Admin."
If Shopify product costs look wrong in the app, they are wrong in Shopify. Fix them at the variant.
3. Shipping - Shopify
Two choices, and they behave very differently.
Use Shopify shipping charges as shipping costs takes what the customer paid you for shipping and books it as what shipping cost you. Only correct when those two numbers really are the same.
Enter shipping costs lets you model your own, one country at a time. Click Add shipping costs, pick the country, then choose Fixed Rate per Order or Order weight-based tiered rates. Weight-based takes one rate per weight band; the unit is fixed at gr and cannot be changed.
The table then lists each country with its Settings and its Shipping Rates, with edit and delete on the row.
4. Gateway Costs - Shopify
You do not add gateways. They appear on their own once your store has transactions.
Each row has a Cost and a Fee. Cost is the percentage taken from the order amount; Fee is the flat charge per order. The panel states the arithmetic: "(Order Amount × Cost% / 100) + Fee".
Click the edit icon on either value to set it and to manage its history.
5. Custom Expenses & Other Income
This is where rent, salaries and software stop being invisible.
Three tabs — Fixed expenses, Variable expenses, Other income — and three buttons above them: Add Fixed Expense, Add Variable Expense, Add Other Income.
Fixed is a set amount over a period: rent, salaries, software. It asks for a Cost, a Start Date, an End Date and whether it is Recurring, then shows you the Cost Per Day it works out to.
Variable scales with something. Pick the Metric it follows — Orders, Total Sales, Blended Ads, Meta Ads or Google Ads — then give it a percentage or a per-order amount.
Other income is money in that isn't a sale.
The Marketing checkbox on an expense marks it as ad spend rather than a general cost. Use the search box and the All / Active / Inactive filter once the list grows.
Watch out for
The Date Range button does nothing on this page. It sits at the top as it does everywhere else, but this page asks the server only for your shop — no dates. The panels show the same thing whichever range is selected.
Costs are dated, and that is the point. Editing a cost from a start date changes that date forward only. Last quarter keeps last quarter's cost, so restating a price today does not quietly rewrite the profit you already reported. That is what the history behind each edit icon is for.
The two Cost of Goods panels have no Added chip. Only Shipping, Gateway and Custom Expenses carry one. Silence from the COGS panels is not confirmation.
Free shipping is not zero shipping cost. If you choose Use Shopify shipping charges as shipping costs and the customer paid nothing to ship, the app records a cost of nothing — while the courier still charged you. Model it manually instead.
A gateway you no longer use still sits in the list. Rows come from historical orders, not from what is currently switched on.
Do this first
Open the page and read the three chips before you touch anything. Every Not added is a real cost currently counted as zero, and every profit number in the app is wrong by that much until you fix it.
See yoursYour five panels, and which of them are still empty.
Open Cost Settings →