Lifetimely: Shop calculation profiles

Shop calculation profiles

At a glance

A shop calculation profile is the store-specific policy Lifetimely applies before it aggregates revenue, costs, profit, CAC, ROAS, and LTV. Use this page to understand which saved setting can change a report, where to edit the customer-facing controls, and how to reconcile two stores or periods that use different calculation logic.

The profile is not a report or a second copy of order data. Two shops with identical orders can show different COGS, margin, refund timing, and marketing spend when their profiles differ.

Availability and data freshness

Availability and prerequisites: The profile is supplied for the active Shopify or Amazon store. The available cost pages differ by platform: Shopify exposes Default gross margin, Transaction costs, and Handling costs, while Amazon exposes FBA fees and FBM handling costs. Some integrations and advanced, custom, or personnel-cost features are plan-gated in the UI.

Freshness and history: Saving Reset product costs to zero for all refunded orders schedules a COGS recalculation; the legacy status message says this can take up to 30 minutes. The Amazon EU VAT control explicitly affects future orders only.

On this page

• Open and change the settings
• Understand calculation order
• Resolve product and shipping costs
• Configure refunds, fees, tax, and personnel
• Control marketing and currency
• Reconcile a report

Open and change the settings

The settings that make up the profile are distributed across several pages; there is no single customer-facing “Shop calculation profile” editor.

Calculation logic

1. Open Settings.
2. Select Calculation logic (/settings_v2/calculation_logic).
3. Change the applicable checkbox. Save changes and Discard appear only after the form is changed.

The page always shows these refund controls, both off by default:

For an Amazon store in the EU region, the page also shows VAT > Don't add taxes to order subtotal. The UI states that changing it affects future orders only; existing order subtotals remain unchanged. This control is hidden for other stores.

Caution: Moving refunds to the order date can revise an earlier period without changing the all-time refund total. Resetting product costs for all refunds changes cost recovery, not the refund revenue itself.

Cost and source settings

Open Cost & Expenses, then use the page that matches the value you need to change:

Marketing account selection and campaign-term exclusions are configured with the relevant ad integration. QuickBooks mappings can replace selected Income Statement COGS, marketing, personnel, or operating-expense categories; they are source mappings rather than base order-cost formulas.

Note: The active report receives the profile from the current store context or request. Report date, comparison, grouping, and complex filters do not edit the profile. Store-wide order exclusions are separate pre-filters.

Calculation order

For reports using the shared profitability pipeline, Lifetimely generally:

1. applies the shop's pre-filters;
2. resolves edited order and line-item quantities;
3. selects product and shipping costs from the configured source hierarchy;
4. applies refund, handling, transaction, and tax settings;
5. converts monetary values to the requested display currency;
6. sums additive amounts; and
7. calculates percentages and ratios from the aggregated totals.

This order matters. A report does not normally calculate each order's margin percentage and average those percentages. Missing cost configuration usually contributes zero rather than excluding the sale, so incomplete product, shipping, handling, transaction, ad, or accounting data can overstate profit and margin.

Product and shipping costs

Product-cost profile

Product COGS is resolved per line item and then summed. The implemented profile supports this precedence:

1. Default margin override, when a positive default margin is configured and Use default gross margin to calculate all product costs is enabled.
2. Lifetimely product cost, using the cost interval applicable to the order.
3. Shopify inventory unit cost, when available with a usable currency rate.
4. Default margin fallback, when a positive default margin is configured.
5. Zero, when no source applies.

The default-margin calculation is cost basis × (1 − default gross margin). With an 80% default margin and a $100 basis, Lifetimely derives a $20 product cost. The default is to use the variant's full Compare at price; Use discounted product price for margin calculation switches to the product-price basis. If override is enabled, the derived amount replaces otherwise available Lifetimely and Shopify costs.

Edited and refunded quantities can change product COGS. Use the refund controls to determine when refunded product cost is reversed.

Shipping-cost profile

Only one shipping source wins for an order; Lifetimely does not add lower-priority sources to the selected cost. The shared profile supports this hierarchy:

1. ShipStation fulfilled-shipment cost;
2. ShipBob fulfilled-shipment cost;
3. Australia Post/Addition shipment cost;
4. Shopify Shipping label cost, when enabled;
5. order-level Lifetimely or CSV-imported shipping cost;
6. shipping charged to the customer, when enabled;
7. matching Lifetimely shipping-zone rule;
8. per-product Lifetimely shipping cost;
9. country-specific Lifetimely shipping cost;
10. worldwide Lifetimely country cost; then
11. zero.

Shipping-zone rules can be fixed, weight-based, or unit-count based. A country-specific rule takes precedence over worldwide. The current request contract also supports choosing how per-product costs combine on a multi-line order: the default uses the highest applicable per-product cost (MAX), while sum costs across line items adds them (SUM). This distinction is useful for one-parcel versus separately shipped items.

Refunds, fees, tax, and personnel

Refund profile

The two Calculation logic switches are independent:

• Refund date: by default, assign a refund to the date it was processed. Assigning it to the original order date is useful for the eventual economics of the sale or acquisition cohort, but can move revenue and cost between reporting periods.
• Refunded product cost: by default, reverse product COGS only for refunded inventory marked as restocked. Enabling the all-refunds option reverses product cost even when the inventory was not marked as restocked.

Handling and transaction profile

Handling cost combines the configured order and item components:

handling cost = per-order handling cost + (per-item handling cost × applicable item count)

For example, a $2 per-order cost and $0.50 per-item cost with three applicable items produces $3.50.

Transaction fees use processed Shopify transaction data and the store's gateway settings, including Shopify Payments percentage and fixed fees and configured third-party-gateway fees. The fixed Shopify Payments fee can use its own configured currency.

Tax and personnel profile

For eligible Amazon EU stores, Don't add taxes to order subtotal prevents tax from being added to future imported order subtotals; it does not rewrite existing order subtotal values.

The personnel burden rate applies to personnel classified as on-staff:

burdened personnel cost = direct personnel cost × (1 + burden rate / 100)

For example, $10,000 of on-staff monthly cost with a 20% burden becomes $12,000.

Marketing and currency

Marketing profile

A profile can restrict spend to selected Google, Facebook, Microsoft/Bing, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, and Amazon ad accounts. Per-account campaign exclusions remove campaigns containing configured terms. These settings change marketing spend and therefore CAC, ROAS, contribution margin, and net profit; unlike order pre-filters, they do not remove commerce orders.

If spend is missing, check the integration connection, selected account IDs, and campaign-term exclusions before treating a report as incomplete. The active transformer sends selected Amazon ad account IDs but intentionally omits Amazon campaign-term exclusions while the campaign data lacks compatible account IDs.

Currency profile

The shop currency is the source currency for merchant-entered values that do not carry their own currency, such as configured product and shipping costs. Reports can request a different display currency.

For a consolidated report:

1. each shop is evaluated with its own profile and source currency;
2. additive amounts are converted to the common display currency;
3. converted amounts are summed; and
4. percentages and ratios are recalculated from combined numerators and denominators.

For example, consolidated gross margin is (combined net sales − combined COGS) / combined net sales, not the sum or simple average of each shop's margin percentages. An incorrect shop currency can distort a consolidated result.

Reconcile a report

When a profit, margin, CAC, ROAS, or LTV value looks wrong:

1. Confirm the active shop or consolidated shop set, report dates, timezone, and display currency.
2. Confirm the visible report controls, then check the separate pre-filters.
3. Use Settings > Calculation logic to verify refund timing and product-cost recovery. For Amazon EU, also check the future-only VAT setting.
4. Open the matching Cost & Expenses page and identify the winning product, shipping, handling, transaction, custom-cost, or personnel source. Check integrations for shipping, ad, or QuickBooks source data.
5. In Income Statement, expand COGS, Marketing, or Operating expenses. Use Products and Orders to inspect lower-grain values; similarly named reports can differ because their population, timestamp, or cost scope differs.
6. Allow a scheduled recalculation to finish before comparing again.

For consolidated results, repeat these checks for every included shop. Profiles remain independent through each shop's calculation, so align platform/source mode, pre-filters, refund treatment, cost fallbacks, integration mappings, shop currencies, and display currency before comparing the consolidated total with individual reports.

Implementation scope: This page documents the active Calculation logic UI, the settings transformed into the Insights ShopSettings request, and shared profitability behavior. A report or integration can use only a subset of the profile. Where a report page gives a more specific formula or source rule, that report page takes precedence.