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SellingPilot Profit Accounting System

1. System Design Purpose

Settlement report structures vary significantly across e-commerce platforms:

  • Different fee names
  • Different granularity of fee breakdown
  • Different ways of expressing taxes
  • Different handling of order-level vs. store-level fees

If raw platform fees are used directly for statistics, cross-platform profit comparison is impossible and a unified report caliber cannot be formed.

Therefore, SellingPilot uses a unified fee model:

All platform fee items are reclassified and aggregated according to SellingPilot’s unified fee structure.

Core objectives:

  1. Unify profit caliber across platforms
  2. Ensure comparable data structure
  3. Avoid profit misjudgment due to platform differences
  4. Provide a stable data foundation for financial and product analysis

2. Fee Allocation Mechanism

2.1 Why Allocate Fees?

In real operations, there are many:

  • Store-level fees (e.g., advertising, storage)
  • Settlement-level fees (e.g., statement adjustments)
  • Fees that cannot be directly attributed to a single order or product

Without allocation:

  • Per-product profit would be seriously overstated
  • Best-seller profit would be inflated
  • Replenishment, advertising, and product selection decisions would be misled

Therefore, the system uses a fee allocation mechanism to reasonably distribute non-order-level fees to the product dimension.

3. General Principles of Fee Allocation

3.1 Fees with Orders and Associated Items

Examples:

  • Order-related platform fees
  • Fulfillment fees tied to orders

Handling:

Allocate by the sales share of all products in that order.

Purpose:

  • Reflect true profit for products in the same order
  • Avoid one product bearing the full fee

3.2 Fees with Orders but No Item

Examples:

  • Order-level fund adjustments on some platforms
  • Cannot be clearly mapped to an SKU

Handling:

  1. The system creates a record with order type Other
  2. The fee is attributed to that virtual Item

Purpose:

  • Do not distort normal product profit
  • Keep accounting complete
  • Ensure settlement amounts can be reconciled

3.3 Fees Without Orders

Examples:

  • Advertising fees
  • Storage fees
  • Store-level service fees
  • Some adjustment fees

Handling:

Allocate by sales proportion to all products in that settlement period.

Allocation scope:

  • Channel
  • Store
  • Current settlement report range

Purpose:

  • Avoid profit concentration on a few products
  • Reflect true cost structure

4. Cost Composition

SellingPilot profit calculation uses a three-part cost model:

Purchase cost + Inbound cost + Outbound cost

4.1 Purchase Cost

Source:

  • Purchase price in the product master table

Rules:

  • If purchase price is maintained, it is used directly
  • If not maintained, the product has no purchase cost

Note:

  • The system does not automatically estimate or fill in purchase price.

4.2 Inbound Cost

Source:

  • Inbound cost field in the product master table

Logic:

  • Match inbound cost by the shipping country of outbound logistics
  • If no match, use default inbound cost
  • If not maintained, no inbound cost

Purpose:

  • Accurate cost across multi-country shipping
  • Avoid a single cost covering multi-warehouse scenarios

4.3 Outbound Cost

Source:

  • Shipping amount on the order shipment

Rules:

  • If seller-fulfilled, use shipment shipping amount
  • If not seller-fulfilled (e.g., platform fulfillment) or marked as shipped:

No outbound cost is generated

Note:

  • Platform fulfillment fees are not automatically treated as outbound cost to avoid double counting.

5. Design Boundary

  1. The system only classifies and allocates existing data
  2. It does not auto-estimate unmaintained costs
  3. It does not subjectively adjust profit
  4. All calculations are based on raw settlement report data