Deciding what to buy is a margin decision, not a spreadsheet

A supplier sends a price list with four thousand references. Perhaps thirty of them are worth buying at what they currently sell for on Amazon. Finding those thirty by hand is where most of the week goes.

Deciding what to buy from a supplier price list is a margin decision. The question is not which products are cheap but which ones still leave money after Amazon fees, fulfilment, shipping and the price they actually sell at today. SellerFlow reads the supplier list and computes that per product before the purchase order exists.

From price list to decision

You load the supplier's file — whatever shape it arrives in — and each line is matched to the product it actually corresponds to. Then the question that matters gets answered per line: at what that product sells for today, after Amazon's real fees and the real cost of moving it, does buying it at this price leave anything?

That is a different question from "is this cheap". A reference can be a great price and still be a bad purchase because the category fee or the size tier eats the difference.

Identity is the part that goes wrong quietly

The expensive mistake is not a wrong margin calculation, it is buying against the wrong product: the same barcode can map to several listings, and picking the wrong one produces a confident answer about a product you are not going to sell.

SellerFlow validates that the match is really the same product and flags the cases where it is not sure, rather than committing to a guess on a purchase order.

Purchase orders that feed the rest

Orders are generated from the decision, with supplier references and quantities, and sent to the supplier from your own account. When the goods arrive, the price you actually paid becomes the cost of goods behind every margin calculation for that product — so the profit figures are built on what you really paid, not on what you once expected to pay.

Case packs, multipacks and units

Supplier price lists talk in cases; Amazon listings talk in units, and sometimes in multipacks of units. Getting that conversion wrong silently multiplies or divides your cost by six. It is handled explicitly here, because it is one of the most common ways a purchasing spreadsheet ends up confidently wrong.

Frequently asked questions

How do I decide what is worth buying from a supplier list?

By computing what each line leaves after all the real costs at the price it sells for today, rather than by margin on cost. A product with a good-looking purchase margin can still lose money once fulfilment fees and shipping are counted, and those are the ones that hurt because you bought depth.

Why does purchase cost matter for pricing?

Because it is the base of the floor under the price. If the cost in the system is wrong, the minimum price is wrong, and the repricer will defend a number that does not protect anything. It is also the number that decides whether buying more depth of a product is an opportunity or a way to tie up cash in something that does not pay.

What happens when a supplier sells in packs?

The pack has to be resolved before the economics mean anything: cost per selling unit is not cost per supplier unit. Getting that wrong scales the cost by the pack size, in either direction, and the error survives all the way into the price floor.

Does the system create purchase orders automatically?

It prepares them; sending is a human decision. A purchase order commits real money to a supplier, and that is not a decision to automate away. What it does automate is the arithmetic underneath: quantities, pack resolution and the cost per selling unit, so the decision you sign is based on numbers nobody had to compute by hand at midnight.

Last updated: 2026-08-19