Setting a price, and the margin you keep

Margin is what you keep after your costs and the fees on the sale, as a percent of the price. It is not markup. Markup counts up from your cost; margin counts down from your price — the same sale can be 100% markup and 50% margin, which is why the two get mixed up and why the smaller-sounding number is the honest one.

A product's price panel holds the sale price, the marketplace whose fees apply, what you keep at that price, and a bar reading it against your target.

Running it backward is often the faster question. Give Batchnook the margin you want to hold and it shows what the product has to sell for. It is the same arithmetic the panel runs forward, so a suggestion can never disagree with the margin you see once you take it.

Some targets have no price behind them. When a channel's percentage fees plus the margin you asked for come to the whole sale, Batchnook says the target is unreachable there instead of printing a number that cannot work. Raising the price does not fix it, because the fee rises with it.

A wholesale preview sits beside the retail figure at half your retail price, so you can see both sides of the same product. It is a preview and is never saved.

Target margins, and the warnings when a product falls under one, come with Bench and up. The price suggestion is on every plan. What the target should be is yours — Batchnook shows you what a price keeps you, never what to charge.