Product Costs Explained

There are 4 methods to setup and manage your product costs.

Use Shopify’s native ‘cost per item’ field
Set each product’s cost in the app
Import product costs via CSV
Set a default gross margin

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.

🔔 Note: The app will first load order information and data for products from Shopify that have sales, so you might see some products missing if you just installed the app.

Option 1: Set Cost per Item Inside Shopify

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

This data is automatically imported and will show on your Product cost data page. If you have used the Shopify Cost per item field for all products, you will not have to add any other product costs manually.

However, if you have not added this for all items, you can also add these on the Product cost data page and head to the ‘Default gross margin’ section below.

For more information, see Shopify’s guide here.

Option 2: Set Product Costs in Lifetimely

Another option is to control all the product costs inside Lifetimely, using the "Lifetimely product cost" field.

🔔 Note: The Lifetimely product cost value has a priority over Shopify's cost per item value, meaning that if a product has both values, Lifetimely will use the Lifetimely product cost field.

To set your product’s costs in Lifetimely:

1: Go to the Cost & expenses link in the left sidebar, that will load the Product costs tab by default

2: For each product, click the pencil icon under the Lifetimely Product Cost heading.
3: Enter your product cost and choose the start and end date periods for when that product cost applies.
4: Click the Add button to save.

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

Option 3: CSV import

Use our CSV import to add Lifetimely Product Costs for multiple products at once.

🔔 Note: The product sync from Shopify must be complete before importing product costs via CSV.

To import your Lifetimely Product Costs via CSV:

1: Go to the Cost & expenses tab to find Product costs

2: Create a CSV file on your computer with two columns: "SKU" and "product_cost".
3: Optionally, you can also import the individual shipping cost by adding a column named "shipping_cost".
4: Save your CSV.
5: On Lifetimely’s product cost page, at the top right-hand side click the Import CSV button.

6: Click Next step or download an example of a CSV file, in case you need to check the file you created or want to create it from the example.

7: Click to choose a file or drag and drop it to upload CSV file.

8: Match the columns if needed, although if you created the file as mentioned above or downloaded the example, this step can be skipped

9: Click Import data after the matching validation is

10: After importing the data from the CSV file, you should see an alert saying if the import was successful or not. In case it is, you should be all set! And if it isn't, a message explaining why will be showed and feel free to reach out if there's anything we can help with.

Option 4: Default COGS Margin

The ‘Default COGS margin’ setting allows you to easily apply a fixed markup percentage to all products.

🔔 Note: The cost data apply by the Default COGS Margin only applies to missing other product cost data.

This value is calculated based on the product’s price including taxes.

To set the Default Gross Margin:

1: Click the Cost & expenses link in the sidebar.
2: Click the Default COGS margin tab on the Cost & Expenses section.
3: Set the default margin value.
4: Click save changes.