Revenue is a vanity metric. Profit per SKU is the job
Most Amazon dashboards are excellent at telling you how much money moved and useless at telling you how much you kept. The fix is unglamorous arithmetic done per unit.
September 14, 2026 · 5 min read
Amazon shows you sales. Sales are not earnings. Between the two sit the referral fee, the fulfillment fee, storage, returns, refund administration, advertising, your cost of goods, inbound freight, and — for anyone who imports — duty and the exchange rate on the day you paid.
Add all of that up per unit and a surprising number of "good" SKUs turn out to be volunteer work.
The number that matters is contribution per unit
Take the price a buyer actually paid, subtract every Amazon fee charged against that specific order, subtract the landed cost of that unit, subtract the advertising spend attributable to that SKU, and subtract the amortized cost of returns for that SKU. What is left is contribution per unit. Multiply by units and you have the truth.
- Use the price paid, not your list price — promotions and coupons are real money.
- Attribute returns to the SKU that generated them, not to a company-wide average.
- Include storage. It is small per unit and enormous per pallet of slow inventory.
- Include ad spend at the SKU level, not the account level, or your winners will subsidize your losers invisibly.
Then act on the ranking
Once SKUs are sorted by contribution, the decisions get simple and slightly uncomfortable. The bottom of the list is where cash is trapped: negative-contribution SKUs should be repriced, repackaged, or discontinued, and slow inventory should be liquidated before storage and aged-inventory surcharges finish the job.
The top of the list deserves the opposite treatment — more inventory cover, more ad budget, and more attention to keeping the listing healthy.
Why so few sellers do it
Because it is a data problem, not an insight problem. The arithmetic is trivial; assembling settlement-accurate fee data, per-order returns, and landed cost in one place is not. That assembly is what MySellerHQ exists to do, and it does it read-only — it can show you that a SKU is losing money, and it structurally cannot change your price behind your back.