Margin Reporting For The Win

We’ve had many requests from clients in the past but, occasionally we get one which really gets us thinking. A client of ours works with StoreFeeder – a platform that allows all of your product, supplier, courier and order information to be managed in one place. It’s a pretty decent tool and was acquired by Royal Mail in 2015 after they successfully built Royal Mail’s game changing Click and Drop offering.

Our client; Mowers-Online; asked us whether it would be possible to create a margin report by transaction ID which automatically gets exported to a Google Sheet for review. It’s not the sort of work we normally do, since we’re a Digital Marketing agency, but generally dealing with Google Scripts and various APIs it was well within our capabilities.

We scoped what Mowers-Online wanted out of the report, a general report indicating the following numbers:

• Ex VAT sale value
• Total product cost
• Delivery cost
• Seller fees (for marketplaces)
• And any discounts applied

From this a working margin is produced and then the orders re further segmented by date, channel order ID and medium. Whilst building the report it became clear that there was a problem reporting stock as well since Storefeeder’s reports are limited and some of the stock is held at supplier level managed by a different platform. As we already had to query the cost prices of products it made sense to also retrieve the stock figures and compile a separate stock snapshot which the Mowers Online could use for stock valuations for management reporting.

The result has actually been quite phenomenal. Being able to see on exactly which orders the business was making lower margins has meant that product pricing could be tweaked better, spotting discount combinations has been a talking point and from this we’ve also been able to generate channel margin reports since the seller fees and commissions are worked into it as well. This has allowed Mowers-Online to identify more opportunities. That’s not even mentioning the time saved on stock reporting.

It’s now been discussed taking this one step further and being proactive as opposed to responsive. We’re now considering creating a margin report by product by sales channel so that any low margin products of their huge catalogue can quickly be identified and rectified before they achieve any sales.

This has also led us to further ideas around automating margin labels into our Google Merchant Centre feeds and driving campaign setups around some the analysis that we do with all of this information. Obviously, we’re incredibly grateful to Mowers-Online for trusting us with this level of data – but with collaboration comes success!

If you’re interested in talking about similar solutions, why not get in touch.