COGS
Also known as: Cost of Goods Sold
The fully-loaded cost to acquire and ready a unit for sale — invoice cost plus prep, freight, duties, and any inbound costs.
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) is the total cost of acquiring inventory and getting it ready to sell. For an Amazon seller, accurate COGS includes the supplier invoice price, inbound freight to your warehouse (or directly to Amazon), import duties, prep center fees, customs broker fees, and any unit-level inspection or labeling costs.
The most common mistake new sellers make is using only the invoice cost as COGS. This understates true cost by 5-25% depending on the supply chain, which then overstates profit and ROI. Decisions made on understated COGS lead to repricing floors that are too low and PPC bids that are too high — both of which silently bleed margin.
SellerVault's cost profiles let you layer all these components per SKU or per supplier so the profit calculations on every dashboard and the floor prices in the repricer reflect TRUE landed cost. If you're tracking COGS in a spreadsheet today, your reported margins are almost certainly wrong by enough to matter.