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Glossary

Amazon seller metrics, defined

The 13 numbers FlipIQ Batch puts on a supplier row, defined the way the product defines them: what each one means, the formula where there is one, and what it is worth when you are deciding whether to buy a line off a wholesale price list.

These are not definitions written for a website. They are the text FlipIQ Batch itself shows next to the results table, read from the same file — so a formula cannot say one thing here and another thing in the product. If you want to put numbers into one of them rather than read what it means, the free tools run the same arithmetic on a single row.

Buy Box (shipping included)

The current price winning Amazon's Buy Box for this product. It's the base used to calculate Profit, ROI and Margin. When it comes from market data it is the landed price — shipping is already inside the figure, so don't add a shipping column on top of it.

On a supplier listA supplier file gives you one half of every calculation on this page — what the unit costs you. This is the other half, and it is the half that moves without asking you.

Best (FBA/MFN)

Shows which fulfillment method gives the better result for this product: FBA (Amazon ships it) or MFN (you ship it). Both scenarios are computed and the winner is shown.

On a supplier listThe same supplier row can be dead as FBA and workable as MFN. A bulky, cheap unit is mostly fee under one and mostly postage under the other, so picking a fulfillment method once for the whole list decides some rows before you have looked at them.

Profit

FormulaProfit = Net revenue − Total cost

Estimated net profit per unit, after Amazon fees, shipping, packaging, promotions, a return reserve, product cost and prep.

On a supplier listProfit in dollars is what says whether a row is worth handling at all. Forty cents a unit is a rounding error once a case has been received, labeled and shipped, however good the percentage next to it looks.

ROI

FormulaROI = Profit ÷ (Cost + Prep + Shipping + Packaging)

How much you earn per dollar you invested to get the product ready to sell. Measures capital efficiency, not the sale price. Reflects the winning scenario (FBA or MFN); multipack products may show a separate corrected per-unit ROI.

On a supplier listWhen the constraint is cash and not shelf space — the usual situation with a supplier list and a fixed budget — this is the column to sort by: it ranks rows by how fast the money comes back to buy the next case.

Margin

FormulaMargin = Profit ÷ Buy Box price

What share of the sale price ends up as net profit. Measures how thin or fat the price is, not how efficient your investment is.

On a supplier listTwo rows with the same ROI can sit at very different margins, and the thin one is the first to go underwater when somebody already on the listing drops their price a dollar.

Cost assumptions (what we deduct)

Profit is computed with real reseller costs, not just Amazon fees: a tiered return reserve (5% of price up to $50, lower % above), your FBA prep + inbound shipping per unit, and for FBM the real outbound shipping (USPS rate by billable weight) plus prep/packaging and a reserve for the round-trip shipping lost on a return. Prep and shipping values come from the cost profile you set on the job. This is why our numbers can look lower than tools that assume $0 shipping and $0 prep — those ROIs don't survive contact with reality.

On a supplier listThis is why the same supplier row can pass in one tool and fail in another. A row whose profit only exists at $0 shipping and $0 prep is not a row you can buy — it is a row you can lose money on efficiently.

Rank / BSR

Best Sellers Rank: the product's position within its Amazon category based on sales velocity. Lower means it sells faster. It's a demand signal, not a profitability signal.

On a supplier listA supplier list has no demand column. BSR is the cheapest demand check there is before you commit to a case pack of something nobody is looking for.

Sellers

How many other sellers are competing for the Buy Box on this listing (includes Amazon itself, flagged AMZ). More sellers usually means more price pressure.

On a supplier listA cheap row on a listing that already has a crowd is a price war you are joining late — and if Amazon itself is one of those sellers, the Buy Box you did the arithmetic against may never be yours.

Rating / Reviews

Average rating and review count for the product on Amazon.

On a supplier listA price list will not tell you that a product comes back. A low rating with a high review count usually will, and returns are the cost that never appears in the supplier's column.

Velocity

A 0-100 read on how fast the listing moves, built from the first signal available, in this order: Amazon's own “bought in the past month” badge when the product has one; failing that, the count of sales-rank drops in the last 30 days; and if neither exists, a coarse estimate from the BSR bracket alone. The three sources are not comparable: a product carrying Amazon's badge lands near 100 almost every time, and a score built from the BSR bracket is an assumption, not a measurement.

On a supplier listMargin on inventory that does not move is a storage bill. This is what separates a profitable row from a profitable row that actually sells.

Price stability

How steady the price stayed over the last ~31 days, read from the Buy Box history (New price as fallback). It is the coefficient of variation of that series, weighted by how long each price was actually in force. 100 = the price barely moved; 0 = it swung 50% or more around its own average. Blank below 7 days of history. It says nothing about account safety or data quality.

On a supplier listYou buy against a price that was true the day the list was analyzed and you sell weeks later, once the units are inbound. This is the read on how wide that gap can open.

Sold/mo

Estimated units sold per month, based on historical market data.

On a supplier listIt turns a per-unit profit into an order size: what the listing absorbs in a month, shared with everyone else selling it, bounds how much of the supplier's case you should actually take.

Revenue/mo

FormulaRevenue/mo = Buy Box price × Units sold/mo

Estimated monthly revenue if the product keeps selling at its current pace.

On a supplier listIt sizes the listing, not your share of it. A large figure with a crowd of sellers on the row measures competition as much as opportunity.

The order these numbers answer in

A supplier list is read from the cheapest question to the most expensive one. Answering them in this order is what stops you from doing arithmetic on rows that were never available to you.

  1. Can this account sell it?

    Not a metric — a permission, and it belongs to your account rather than to the product. A row your account is gated on is worth nothing at any margin, which is why the check runs first and runs against the Amazon account you connect. How the check works.

  2. Is anyone buying it, and do they keep it?

    Rank / BSR and Velocity say whether the listing moves, Sold/mo and Revenue/mo say how much of it moves, and Rating / Reviews is the closest thing you get to a warning that the units come back.

  3. Does it survive the real costs?

    Buy Box sets the ceiling, Best (FBA/MFN) picks the cheaper way to fulfill it, and Profit, ROI and Margin answer three different questions about the same row — is it worth handling, is it worth the cash, is it worth the risk. What gets deducted before any of them is the cost model. To put your own numbers through all three at once, on one row, the FBA & FBM calculator shows the formula under every figure.

  4. Will the price still be there when the units are?

    You commit today and sell weeks later. Price stability reads how much the Buy Box has moved lately and Sellers reads how many people can move it next.

Where these definitions come from

They are the product's own text
Every definition above is read from the same file the results table reads when you open its help drawer inside FlipIQ Batch. A formula that changes in the product changes on this page in the same deploy. That is the whole reason the page exists in this shape rather than as thirteen short articles somebody has to remember to update.
Where the fee numbers come from
The FBA and FBM fees behind Profit, ROI and Margin are the ones Amazon's Selling Partner API returns for the item, not a rate table we maintain. Prep and inbound shipping are yours: they come from the cost profile set on the job, which is why two accounts can get different answers out of the same supplier row.
What this page deliberately does not define
Whether your account may sell a given row. That is not a metric with a formula: it is a per-account answer that comes from a read-only official OAuth connection to the account itself, and no number here changes it. What the connection can and cannot do.

Knowing the definitions is the easy part

Applying every one of them to a single product takes a minute. Applying them to every row of the list a distributor just sent you is the actual job. FlipIQ Batch takes that list the way it arrived — Excel, CSV or a 300-page PDF — and returns the rows your account can sell at a margin. The free plan covers 5,000 rows a month and does not ask for a card.