ProfitFlow Overview and Onboarding

ProfitFlow is the latest release from SoStocked and helps Amazon sellers to forecast their profit into the future using the underlying forecasting algorithm of SoStocked, coupled with projecting your COGs, profit margins and future Amazon fees. This tool will give you insight into which ASINs are making you profit, and which ASINs are potentially costing you money. Please refer to the Overstock and Aged Inventory Fees tutorial for more on how Amazon fees work.

This tutorial will show you how the tool works, and how to easily onboard your catalog by uploading your costs for future profit forecasting.

NOTE: This tool is currently in beta and we are allowing select SoStocked users to participate in the testing and feedback of the tool until such time as we widely release it to the public. If you are interesting in joining the beta, please apply here.

IMPORTANT: If you have any team members that you do not want to see financial data, you can change their role to Associate or Viewer. Here’s a tutorial on how to adjust user roles.

OVERVIEW VIDEO

This video gives you the overview of how ProfitFlow beta works in its current form. Again, this is a work in progress and we will update this tutorial as we fine-tune it.

ONBOARDING STEPS

ProfitFlow is simple to self-onboard, no help or assistance should be required from our team. Just follow the videos below. If you run into any issues, email us directly at [email protected]. Be sure to include specifics, including any files you attempted to upload, affected ASINs, etc. The more details you provide the better help you will receive.

OPTIONAL: If you connected your API prior to April 1st, you’ll need to re-authorize your API connection to pull additional necessary reports. (IMPORTANT! DO NOT DISCONNECT). If unsure, reach out to [email protected].

Upload Landed Cost information

Start on the Bulk exports page.
Download an Active Products Export.
Scroll over to the Primary Supplier section and input any costs associated with your supplier, including shipping costs.
If there are any other costs associated that you want to fill in such as, prep costs, for example, you can fill them into the "Shipping Costs" column. We do not have a way to separate each type of cost out at this time. So please include all shipping costs here. So, shipping by ocean, into FBA or anything else that you might be incurring, such as the inbound placement fees.
Save the file and upload it per the tutorial on this Bulk Exports Page. And you're done!

Upload TACoS data (if using)

We have developed an TACoS Calculator which will calculate your TACoS percentage per ASIN using 2 reports from your Seller Central account.

We currently have an internal EU version of this calculator, please reach out to [email protected] and we can assist you with this.

1: Make a Copy of the TACoS Calculator

Open up the TACoS Calculator

File > “Make a Copy”

2: Download Seller Central Reports

Detail Page Sales & Traffic Report by ASIN for the past 30 days. This can be found under Reports > Business Reports > Detail Page Sales and Traffic.

Bulk Operations Sponsored Products Data for the past 30 days. This can be found under Advertising > Campaign Manager > Bulk Operations.

3: Download SoStocked Ad Spend Export

Go to Bulk Export/Import in SoStocked.

Under Download Types, select Ad Spend (at the bottom).

Click to download the Ad Spend template.

4: Paste Ad Spend Export into the TACoS Calculator.

Open the Ad Spend template.

Copy the data from column B (Marketplace) to column G (SoStocked Product ID)

Paste this into the TACOS Calculator Ad Spend Template Tab.

IMPORTANT: Make sure to not paste any data into column A (TACoS %) as it contains a formula that will be overridden by the data from your Amazon reports.

5: Paste in Your Amazon Reports

Before pasting in your Amazon reports, click the Clear Data button in the template and select US.

Copy and paste data from your Ads Bulk Report and Business Report into the respective tabs.

Formulas in the sheet will automatically calculate TACoS and populate the data within the “Ad Spend Template” tab.

6: Generate and Download Upload File

Click the Create Upload File button.

The first time you do this, authorize the script with your Google account.

The script will generate a clean upload file with formulas removed (required for SoStocked Import).

7: Upload the File to SoStocked

Download the generated file as a CSV.

In SoStocked, return to Export/Import and scroll to Upload Updated Data.

Drop in your new CSV file.

Select Ad Spend as the upload file type.

Click Upload.

Once the upload is complete, you'll see an “Upload finished successfully” message, if any errors occur, reach out to [email protected] for assistance.

OPTIONAL TACoS UPLOAD

Go to your Bulk Exports Page and export the sheet called Ad Spend. It will export as “TACoS”. Download that sheet.
Add your TACoS % for each product, per marketplace. You can get these numbers from whatever other software you use to track your existing profit.
One product can have different TACoS per marketplace. You can use either ASIN, UPC or SKU as the product identifier. That % will be converted into dollars, which will count against your profitability per product per marketplace.
Save and upload.

Review missing data

Now that you your costs have been uploaded into ProfitFlow, want to make sure that all of the data that you're looking at includes all of the costs that you intended to include.

There are a couple of mega columns that will give you some insight into data that might be missing. One of them is the profit by month and the other one is unit economics. These both have unit costs as one of their columns inside of the mega columns. You'll able to see by hovering over all of the costs that are associated with each ASIN.
When you are checking that the data has been input into SoStocked ProfitFlow you're going to look for these asterisks. There's a green one and then there's a red one. So the green tells us that we have not uploaded any ad spend.
If you are not interested in including ad spend and then you can just ignore this. If you do want your ad costs calculated into your profit, then go back to the previous video and upload those numbers.
The red asterisk means key data is missing, such as cost/unit, shipping costs and FBA fees. Aged fees, TACoS and “other” are optional. So go back and upload anything that you want to track.
Since it would be difficult to check every product on this dashboard, we have built some dashboards and filters to help you find this missing information in bulk.
On the filters at the top of your dashboard, select “Missing Unit Data” > “Is Missing” then select either Costs, Price or Advertising.
We also have saved dashboards that will filter this for you. Access your dashboards on the left column and select one of the pre-build “Missing” dashboards there.
It may happen that Amazon simply failed to send us key data such as unit price, etc. If that’s the case please reach out to our support team to fix this.
On the Missing Ad Spend dashboard if you are missing only a few, you can edit them right here on this dashboard by clicking the blue pencil icon next to the product.
Lastly, if you are missing costs such as cost/unit, shipping costs, Referral Fee or Fulfillment Fees, you can sort this dashboard by descending to see which products are missing costs.

If you are missing future storage costs it could be either that you do not have unit dimensions saved or it could be that this product has such low inventory at FBA that you will likely sell through within the next month and thus no future costs can be calculated on the stock you have at FBA right now. Again, if you have questions, just contact our support team.

SET UP IS COMPLETE!

If you have any issues please email us directly at [email protected]. Be sure to include specifics, including any files you attempted to upload, affected ASINs, etc. The more details you provide the better help you will receive.

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