Sales, profit and tracking

A sale, in StockFeel, is not an item whose status changed. It is a line of its own, carrying its own units, its price and its profit. This guide explains what that choice changes in practice: when you sell, when you cancel, and a year later when you read a closed period again.

Confirming a sale detected in an email

When Gmail detection recognises a confirmation, it does not touch your stock. It leaves a match to confirm: a badge appears on the inventory, with the item it believes it recognises, the price read in the email and the date.

You have three possible moves.

• Confirm, and it is that click which creates the sale: the quantity is decremented, the sale line is written with its price and its date.
• Change the item, if the match aimed slightly off. Two pairs of the same model in two sizes look very alike in an email.
• Dismiss, if the email was not a sale. The email stays marked as seen and will not come back.

The same mechanism covers order confirmations, which suggest a purchase rather than a sale, and tracking numbers spotted in a shipping email.

Selling by hand

From the inventory, the sell action on an item asks for the price, the quantity, the platform and the date. Quantity matters: selling two units of a lot of five creates a sale of two units and leaves three in stock. Profit is computed per unit sold, not on the whole item.

What the sale line retains

At the moment it is created, the sale takes a snapshot of the item: name, SKU, size, category, photos, reception date, purchase price. It never reads them elsewhere again.

That is what makes a sale a dated fact. Fixing a typo in an item's name does not rewrite past sales, nor their label in an accounting export of a closed period. Reclassifying an item into another category does not change the computation of a sale already recorded.

Profit, and what gets deducted

The gross profit of a line is the sale price times the quantity, minus the purchase price times the same quantity.

What is then deducted is the shipping cost when the label price is known on the sale. Marketplace commission is not deducted automatically: if you want a profit net of commission, carry it in the purchase price or lower the sale price, but know that the column is not filled in for you.

TCG cards are the exception: their prices are recorded already net of fees, so no fee is deducted a second time, on any platform.

Cancelling a sale, or deleting it

These are two distinct actions, and they do not do the same thing.

Cancelling puts the quantity back in stock. If the item still exists, its quantity is simply incremented. If it had disappeared with its last unit, it is recreated from the sale's snapshot: you get back the same name, the same SKU, the same size and the same purchase price. This is the action for a sale that falls through, a buyer who does not pay, or a parcel that comes back.

Deleting removes the sale line permanently and does not touch stock. This is the action for a line created by mistake, an import duplicate for instance, and not for a sale that did not complete.

An item carrying sales cannot be deleted: the request is refused rather than taking the history away with it.

Parcel tracking

A tracking number placed on a sale or on an item is polled automatically. The refresh runs every thirty minutes, because a carrier only updates its state a few times a day, and it only polls parcels that are still moving: a delivered parcel is no longer questioned.

On delivery, a notification goes out. A parcel in trouble, held at customs or after a failed delivery, is not treated as finished: it keeps being tracked, and goes back to in transit if the situation clears.

Reading a period back

The dashboard carries two views built on these same lines: analytics, and accounting. Revenue, cost of goods sold, gross profit, fees, net profit and margin read over the period you choose.

The accounting export writes those lines into a file separate from the inventory export. Because every sale carries its own snapshot, an export run again two years later gives exactly the same labels and the same amounts as the first one.