How reports and analytics work
Four reports do most of the work in a resale business: sell-through, aging, margin after fees, and channel performance. Everything else is interesting. These four change what you buy, what you price and where you list.
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The four that matter
| Report | Question it answers | Decision it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Sell-through | What percentage of what I bought has sold? | What to buy more and less of |
| Aging | How much capital is sitting in old stock? | What to mark down now |
| Margin after fees | What do I actually keep per sale? | Pricing, and which channels to use |
| Channel performance | Which channels earn their overhead? | Where to concentrate listing effort |
Sell-through by category
Sell-through is the closest thing resale has to a north-star metric. It tells you whether your buying is working, and unlike revenue it cannot be flattered by discounting.
Read it by category and by season rather than in aggregate. A store-wide number of 60% hides the fact that one category runs at 85% and another at 20%, and only the split view tells you what to do differently at the next buying opportunity.
Aging
Aging converts a vague feeling that the back room is full into a number: this much capital is in stock older than ninety days. For buy-outright stores that number is money you have already spent and not yet recovered.
Margin after fees is the only margin
A $60 sale with a $20 cost is not a $40 margin. Take off the marketplace commission, the payment processing, the shipping you subsidised and the promoted-listing spend, and the real number is frequently half what the headline suggests.
This is why cost has to be captured at intake. Margin reporting is impossible to reconstruct after the fact, and it is the report that most often changes how a business prices.
Channel performance
Every channel has a cost beyond its commission: the listing effort, the messages, the returns behaviour, the fulfilment expectations. Channel reporting shows revenue and margin per channel so you can decide whether a marketplace is earning the attention it takes.
The common finding is that one or two channels produce most of the profit and a long tail produces occasional sales at low margin. That is not automatically a reason to leave the tail, but it is a reason to stop giving it equal effort.
Consignor and vendor reporting
For consignment stores and malls there is a fifth report: performance per consignor or per booth. It answers which consignors bring inventory that sells and which bring volume that ages, which is the input to a conversation you should be having annually.
Frequently asked questions
Can I export reports?
Yes. Export to a spreadsheet for board packs, accountants or your own analysis. What you should not do is rebuild the reports in a spreadsheet as a habit — that reintroduces the manual reconciliation the system exists to remove.
How far back does reporting go?
As far back as your data. If you imported twelve months of history at migration, that is where your reporting starts.
Can I report per location?
Yes. Multi-site businesses can filter by location and also see consolidated totals, which is what most owners and boards want side by side.
Why does my margin look worse than I expected?
Almost always shipping and marketplace fees, which are easy to underestimate individually and substantial in aggregate. That is the report doing its job — the margin was always this number; you just could not see it before.
Step-by-step product docs
This guide explains how it works. These show you exactly where to click.
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