Numbers you can follow.

Contribution, not accounting net profit

Gross revenue includes product sales and collected shipping, excluding tax. We deduct discounts, successful reconciled refunds, COGS, shipping, fulfilment, payment fees, advertising allocations and other configured variable costs. Fixed overhead and unconfigured costs are not included.

Dates and refunds

We compare 28 complete UTC days against the preceding 28. Period endpoints are exclusive. This is order-cohort analysis: a refund changes the economics of its original order, not the cash-flow period in which it was paid. Recent cohorts may have had less time to return. COGS is not automatically reversed for returned items because usable inventory recovery has not been established.

Precision and allocations

Financial arithmetic uses decimal numbers with currency-specific minor units and half-up rounding. Order-level costs and shipping revenue are allocated to lines in proportion to pre-refund, post-discount merchandise revenue; zero-revenue orders use quantities. Largest-remainder allocation reconciles every line amount to its order total. Multi-product line allocations are estimates.

Cost provenance

CSV product costs apply from their explicit effective date. Shopify inventory costs apply only from the date observed and are estimates for order costing. Merchant-configured shipping, fulfilment and payment costs remain estimates. Payment fees use pre-refund revenue excluding tax plus the configured fixed fee; actual gateway charges can differ.

Missing and complex data

Missing required costs mean contribution profit is withheld. Optional excluded categories are shown explicitly. Edited, cancelled, gift-card and unreconciled refund orders are marked incomplete until supported reconciliation is available. No currency conversion is inferred. The product does not claim full accounting coverage.

Detection and impact

Rules require meaningful order volume, revenue, movement and impact. Each finding exposes its thresholds and formula. Impacts use a 30-day run rate at observed volume. Discount impact is an upper-bound revenue exposure, not an estimate of what removing the discount would recover. Findings can overlap; the feed highlights the largest individual estimate, never their sum as guaranteed savings.

Reproducibility

Each merchant analysis saves a versioned input snapshot, output and digest. Finding detail pages expose historical comparisons, affected orders and downloadable calculation JSON. No AI model calculates or overrides financial values.