A 10-Point Pricing Audit

Updated 2026-08-31 · ProfitKit

Prices decay. Costs rise, fees change, postage goes up, and a price set eighteen months ago is now something else entirely. This audit takes an afternoon and usually finds more money than a week of marketing.

1. Recalculate the landed cost of your top five sellers

Current supplier price, current freight, current duty. Not the figures on the spreadsheet — the figures on the most recent invoice. This alone frequently explains a missing margin.

2. Confirm the fee rates you are assuming

Open the platform's fee page and your own account statements. Percentages, fixed per-order amounts, and anything you have opted into since. Promoted-listing fees in particular are often forgotten after being switched on once.

3. Check your real postage against what you charge

Weigh a packed parcel and price it at today's rates. Sellers absorbing a postage increase they never noticed are extremely common.

4. Add up your per-order fixed cost

Payment fixed fee, packaging, your dispatch time. This is the number that makes small orders unprofitable, and most sellers have never calculated it.

5. Find your worst product

Calculate contribution margin per unit for every SKU and sort ascending. Something at the bottom is losing money on every sale. Reprice it, bundle it, or stop selling it.

6. Find your best product and check you are promoting it

Sort by contribution per unit, not by margin percentage or revenue. The product that contributes the most cash per sale deserves your attention, and it is often not the one getting it.

7. Write down a floor price for everything

The price at which margin hits zero, per SKU. Without it, every promotion is a guess. With it, you can discount confidently.

8. Audit your discounts and coupons

List every active discount and calculate the volume multiple each one needs to break even. Anything requiring more than 2× is almost certainly costing you money. Anything exceeding your margin entirely is losing money on every use.

9. Check your cheapest and most expensive orders

Pull one real order at each end and calculate actual profit. The cheap one is often negative; the expensive one often reveals you could charge more.

10. Set a review date

Put a recurring reminder in the calendar — quarterly is enough. The point of an audit is that it happens again, because the next fee change is coming whether you plan for it or not.

Expect to change prices

An audit that changes nothing usually means the numbers were not checked properly. If you find a product below its floor, fix it the same day: recalculate at your target margin and move the price. The break-even volume mathematics of a price rise is far kinder than most sellers expect.

Do the calculation