Profitability · Guide
How to calculate your real Amazon seller profit (2026 guide)
Seller Central will show you sales. It will show you ad spend. It will show you fees, in a separate report, in a different format. What it will not do is add these together and tell you what you actually made. Here's the full formula, and a worked example you can run against your own numbers.
The full profit formula
Net Profit = Selling Price − Referral Fee − FBA/Fulfilment Fee − Product Cost (COGS) − Ad Spend (allocated) − Storage & Long-Term Storage Fees − Returns & Refund Admin Fees ± Reimbursements
Every one of these lines lives in a different report. Selling price and referral fee are in your Orders report. FBA fees and storage are in the Fee Preview and Storage reports. COGS lives wherever you track purchase orders — often a spreadsheet. Ad spend is in the Ads console. Reimbursements and refund admin fees only show up in the settlement report. Nothing in Seller Central combines them per SKU automatically.
A worked example
Take a product selling at ₹1,200, with a supplier cost of ₹400 landed:
| Line item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Selling price | ₹1,200 |
| Referral fee (~15%) | −₹180 |
| FBA fulfilment fee | −₹110 |
| Product cost (COGS) | −₹400 |
| Ad spend (allocated per unit) | −₹96 |
| Storage fee (allocated per unit) | −₹18 |
| Returns & refund admin (allocated) | −₹42 |
| Net profit per unit | ₹354 (29.5%) |
Notice how far this is from what a seller glancing only at "ACoS" or "gross margin" would assume. The 15% referral fee and rough COGS math might suggest a much healthier number — it's the ad spend, storage and returns allocated in that no dashboard shows by default that quietly close the gap.
Where sellers get this wrong
- Using revenue-based ACoS instead of margin-based break-even ACoS. A 20% ACoS means something completely different for a 40%-margin product than a 15%-margin one.
- Averaging ad spend across the whole catalogue instead of allocating it per SKU — this hides which specific products are actually profitable.
- Ignoring storage and long-term storage fees because they're billed monthly at account level, not tied to an individual sale.
- Calculating COGS once and never updating it as supplier costs, freight and duties shift.
- Treating refunds as lost revenue only, missing that Amazon also retains a portion of the referral fee on every return.
Why a spreadsheet only gets you halfway
A manual profit spreadsheet works for the first month. It breaks down the moment you add SKUs, run promotions, or need the number updated daily instead of after a weekend of exports. Ad spend, settlement data and COGS all need to be pulled, matched by date and SKU, and rebuilt every time you want a current answer — which is exactly the maintenance burden that makes most sellers fall back on ACoS or gross margin instead of true profit.
BI Adlytics pulls ad spend, settlement fees, returns and your product cost together automatically and shows true net profit per SKU, updated daily — the number in the table above, without the spreadsheet.