Cost Metrics

Overview

Cost metrics track every expense that comes out of your TikTok Shop revenue -- from the products themselves to platform fees, shipping, and warehouse costs. Understanding these costs is essential for knowing whether your shop is truly profitable. All cost values are shown as positive numbers on the frontend for readability, but they reduce your profit.

Metrics

COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)

• What it shows: The total cost of the products you sold, based on the unit costs you entered on the Inventory page.
• Formula: Unit Cost x Quantity for each item sold
• Where you see it: Dashboard, Profit & Loss, Sales & Profit, Product Details
• How costs are determined: Dashboardly now supports product-level defaults with SKU-level overrides. When calculating COGS for a sold item, the system reads the cost from the inventory record for that SKU. If the SKU has its own cost set, that value is used. If not, the product-level default is used. If neither is set, COGS defaults to $0. This means you can set cost once per product and have it apply to all variants automatically.
• Important notes: COGS must be configured manually on the Inventory page -- Dashboardly cannot automatically know what you paid for your products. If COGS shows as zero, go to Inventory and set your unit costs (at the product level or per SKU). COGS is included even for orders that were refunded but where the product was NOT returned to you, because you still lost that inventory.

Fees & Taxes

• What it shows: The total platform fees TikTok charges on your sales.
• Formula: Referral Fee + Co-funded Promotion Fee + Other Fees
• Where you see it: Dashboard, Profit & Loss, Sales & Profit
• Fee accuracy: Fees are now normalized per line item for multi-item orders. When an order contains multiple products, platform fees, taxes, and commissions are allocated proportionally to each item rather than being lumped together. This makes per-product profit calculations more accurate, especially for promotional orders where discounts apply unevenly across items.
• Important notes: This includes TikTok's referral fee (their commission on each sale), transaction processing fees, and any other platform charges. The breakdown into individual fee types is visible on the Profit & Loss page. Recent orders may show estimated fees based on your shop's historical fee rate; these estimates are replaced with exact amounts once TikTok settles the order. See Understanding Your Data Quality for the full progression.

Shipping Cost

• What it shows: The net financial impact of shipping on your profit. This can be positive or negative.
• Formula: Pulled from TikTok settlement data (net shipping amount)
• Where you see it: Profit & Loss, Sales & Profit