Product costs explained

Lifetimely automatically loads all the products from Shopify, so there's no need for a manual import. Products will show up in the "Product costs" page, where product cost data is also managed. 

The app first loads all the order information and data for products from Shopify that have sales, so you might see some products missing if you just installed the app.

There are fours ways to manage product costs:

  1. Use Shopify “cost per item” -field
  2. Setting product costs in the app
  3. Import via CSV
  4. Default sales margin
Option 1: Shopify's "Cost per item

Nowadays Shopify has a "Cost per item" field available for every product, which you can find from the product pricing section:

Lifetimely automatically loads this data and it will show up in the Product cost data -page, where you can also find products that don't have cost data associated with them. So if you're already using this field for all your products, there's no need for further action. 

But if you've got cost data just for some of your products, head to the "Default sales margin" section below. 

Option 2: Setting product costs in the app
Another option is to control all the product costs inside Lifetimely, using the "Lifetimely product cost" -field. This value has a priority over the Shopify's cost per item value, meaning that if a product has both values, Lifetimely will use the "Lifetimely product cost" -field.
If you just have one product cost that you want to apply to all data, then you can leave the start and end date empty. This will create a single product cost that stretches across all data.

However, it is possible that a product's cost changes over time. In this case, you have the ability to set different costs across multiple timeframes for the same product.
Let's say that a product cost is $10 but then your supplier raises prices and therefore your product cost increases to $15. You now want to add a higher product cost starting from a specific date. Accordingly, you can have two product costs: In the example below, all sales on and before 06/07/2020 have a product cost of $10 and all sales on and after 06/08/2020 have a product cost of $15.

Please note: Don't forget to save all Lifetimely product and shipping cost changes at the same time by clicking the green "Save all changes" button at the bottom of the page.

Option 3: CSV import

Instead of manually adding costs in the app for every product, you can also do a mass import using a CSV-file. 

How to import shipping costs for individual orders:

1. Go to Shipping cost -settings:

2. Select "CSV-import (shown below)

3. Download the example file by clicking the link Download an example CSV file.

4. Format your data to match the example file. The CSV-file needs to have the columns: "SKU" and "product_cost". 

5. You can also import the individual shipping cost by adding a column named "shipping_cost". 

6. Import your file. You can either use a CSV file in the above format or can manually add the SKU, Product, and Shipping costs in the spreadsheet you see in the import window.

7. You will be asked if your import file has column headers

8. We will then auto map the columns in your CSV file with the columns in our database and will ask you to confirm the mapping.

9. You can then do a final review of your import data

10. Before your data gets added to the system, we will ask you to submit the data you reviewed -

When you do a CSV import, you will override any existing Lifetimely shipping and product cost data that exists in our system.

Please note: The product sync from Shopify has to be ready before doing a CSV-import. 

Option 4: Default sales margin

If you're pricing products with a fixed markup percentage, you can just use the "Default sales margin" setting. This value is calculated from the product price with taxes.

So if you've got a product that is sold at a price of $10 (with taxes) and your markup is $2, then your sales margin is 20%.

The default sales margin is also handy if just some of your products are missing cost data as it only applies to products that don't have costs associated with them. We highly recommend all users to set a default sales margin value just as a backup. 


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