Supplier costs, margin math, and keeping Shopify's numbers honest. Written for stores that buy wholesale and resell — no fluff, no growth-hacking.
Hardware and industrial suppliers don't send a price — they send a list and a rule. Multipliers and column pricing, per-C and per-M quoting, standard packs, effective dates, and the surcharges that move your cost with no new price book at all.
Fixed catalogs, contract pricing, open quotes and volume breaks keep selling at yesterday's cost. Why the channel with the thinnest protection is usually your biggest one — plus five post-price-file checks and the clauses that prevent a repeat.
How warehouse distributor pricing actually works — line codes, jobber vs dealer net, ACES and PIES, supersessions, update cadence — plus a review routine that survives a catalog of tens of thousands of part numbers.
A refundable deposit that isn't cost, a price floor set by the brand, and part numbers that change identity mid-year. Three distortions generic profit tools get wrong — and how to handle each.
Quantify it in dollars before you feel anything about it, verify the letter against the actual file, pull the levers that exist, reprice selectively — and make the next check automatic. Includes the forward-buy math.
List vs jobber vs net, chained discounts, per-case pricing, part numbers Excel silently mangles, and the rows that quietly disappear. A field guide to matching a supplier's spreadsheet to your catalog.
Freight, duty, brokerage, FX and shrink turn a $9.00 line into $11.13 — a 35.7% margin into 20.5%. How to build a landed cost, how to allocate it, and when it isn't worth the effort.
Bulk editor, CSV import, apps and the Admin API — plus the empty-column trap that blanks thousands of costs in one import, and why you always export first.
Four formulas that matter: your real margin now, the hold-margin price, the monthly dollar impact, and how much extra volume you'd need if you chose not to reprice. With worked examples.
What the cost field actually feeds, its three structural limits, and the subtle reason stale costs permanently corrupt your profit reports instead of failing loudly.
A 50% markup is a 33% margin. The confusion only ever runs one way — it always flatters you. Formulas, a conversion table, and the two places it costs real money.