Revenue is vanity. Know what each channel actually pays you.
Sell across a handful of marketplaces and your top-line looks healthy. But StockX, GOAT, eBay, SHEIN, TikTok, KicksCrew, and your own Shopify store each take a different cut, in a different way — commissions, payment fees, cashout fees, per-order flats, shipping labels, ad spend. The same pair of shoes can net you twenty dollars on one channel and five on another. If you're not measuring profit per channel, you're flying on revenue you never actually keep.
Every channel takes its cut differently
The fees aren't just different sizes — they're different shapes, and that's what makes channel profit so easy to misread. StockX and GOAT bundle their commission and payment fees into a single payout and ship the item for you, so your only other cost is goods. GOAT adds a 2.9% cashout fee on top when you withdraw. Shopify barely charges a fee — under 3% plus thirty cents — but you pay to ship every order and you pay to acquire the customer in the first place. eBay takes over 13% and a flat fee, but gives you a free shipping label above a price threshold. SHEIN and TikTok sit in the middle on fees but make you eat the shipping. Line them up and the "cheapest" channel is rarely the one you'd guess.
From payout to real profit
True per-order profit is a short ladder: start with the sale price, subtract the channel's fees to get your actual payout, then subtract the cost of goods, the shipping you paid, and any acquisition cost. What's left is the number that matters. Roll that up across every unit and every channel and you get a real profit-and-loss statement by channel — units, gross sales, fees, COGS, shipping, net profit, and margin — instead of a revenue chart that hides which channels are quietly unprofitable. The workspace below is a full month's P&L: the company summary ledger, a card for every channel, and — click into one — the line-by-line transaction table behind it. The whole point is the tie: the number on the channel card, the number in the summary, and the total at the foot of the table are always the same, because they're all the same calculation.
And that's before returns. Channels like SHEIN, TikTok, and eBay hand back a share of every month's sales, and a return doesn't simply reverse the payout — you frequently eat the return shipping and the handling on top. A channel that looks healthy on gross sales can turn thin once its refund rate is baked in, which is exactly why profit has to be measured net of returns, per channel, rather than as a comfortable blended average that lets the losers hide behind the winners.
About the data below: this demo is branded West Coast Deals because that's the operation it was built for, but every figure in it is invented — a fixed sample catalogue, not live or historical trading data. The logic is the real thing; the numbers are not.
2026 Overview
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Route each product to its best channel
Once you can see net profit per channel per product, a decision falls out of it: list each item where it nets the most. A high-ticket sneaker often does best on a marketplace that ships for free and charges a modest commission; a low-cost tee does best on your own store or a low-fee social channel where a flat shipping cost doesn't swallow the margin. The gap between a product's best and worst channel is real money — and it's money you capture just by listing smarter, not by selling more.
Why a spreadsheet can't keep up
Channel fees change, payout formulas differ per platform, shipping rules have thresholds, and cost of goods shifts with every purchase order. Doing this by hand in a spreadsheet is a monthly slog that's stale the moment it's finished. A system that ingests each channel's payout export, matches it to your real landed costs, and applies the right fee formula per channel turns that slog into a live P&L — so "which channel is actually making me money" is a dashboard, not an investigation.
See your real channel P&L
This demo is one build for one business. Yours would map your channels, your fee structures, your cost basis, and the overheads that actually hit your bottom line. Tell me where you sell and I'll show you what the tool would look like.