True margin per SKU, after everything

Ask most fashion brands for the margin on a style and you get one number, worked out at the moment the buy was placed: price minus cost. It is a useful planning figure and a poor description of what actually happened.

Everything expensive arrives after the sale. Marketplace commission, payment fees, picking and shipping, the cost of processing a return and putting the garment back into stock, the discount applied in week nine. None of it is in the line-sheet number.

Commission is not one rate. Every channel takes a different cut, and the same coat can carry an eighteen per cent commission in a department store and three per cent on your own site. A style that looks healthy on blended margin can be losing money on the channel that sells most of it.

A return costs more than the refund. You lose the sale, you pay shipping twice, and someone has to inspect, repack and relist the garment. On a heavily returned style that handling cost is often larger than the margin on the units that stayed sold.

Overheads have to land somewhere. Rent, salaries, software and marketing are real money. Spreading them across units sold turns a contribution figure into something closer to a real profit per style, and it usually reorders the ranking.

Which is the point. Sort your catalogue by line-sheet margin, then by margin after everything, and the two lists disagree. The styles that move between them are the ones worth a decision.

None of this is exotic accounting. It is your own costs, your own commission rates and your own returns, applied per SKU rather than once at the bottom of a spreadsheet.

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What this looks like in practice

Reportly builds a profit and loss per SKU: revenue, then cost of goods, commission at the rate you set for each channel, returns handling, fulfilment and a share of overheads.

Where a cost is not known, it is shown as not known rather than assumed. A margin figure with a visible gap in it is more useful than a confident one built on a default.

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