Unit Cost Coverage
Unit Cost Coverage shows which products you sold have a unit cost, and how much of your sales they cover.
How It’s Calculated
The report lists every product variant that sold in the date range, with the most sales first. There’s one row per variant, up to 10,000 rows.
The cards at the top show:
- Total Products Sold: the number of variants that sold. A product with 3 variants counts as 3.
- Products with Cost Data: the number of those variants with a unit cost set. A cost of 0 counts.
- Item Net Sales Coverage: the share of those variants’ sales that comes from variants with a cost.
The columns are:
- Product: the product’s title and image. Choose it to open the product’s page, if your store can open them. A sold variant that By the Numbers can’t find in your catalog shows as Unknown.
- SKU: the variant’s SKU.
- Unit Cost: the variant’s Cost per item in Shopify, or a dash when it’s not set. A cost of 0 shows as a zero amount.
- Units Sold: the units sold in the range.
- Item Net Sales: what the variant sold for, after discounts: price times quantity, less the discount on that line. It leaves out returns, shipping and tax.
- Coverage: Costed when a unit cost is set, including 0. Missing when it’s not set.
Orders count on the day they were processed, in your store’s time zone. Canceled orders, and orders whose payment was voided or expired, are left out.
Segment narrows the report to customers in a segment. It has no Filters or Sales Channel control.
Why Costs Matter
Profit reports take each variant’s unit cost from your catalog, using the cost set today. A line item whose variant has no cost counts as zero cost. COGS is then too low, and gross profit and margin are too high.
A cost of 0 counts as a cost here and in the profit reports.
A variant with no cost still adds its full sales to the totals. The more Item Net Sales sit in Missing rows, the less you can trust your profit figures.
What Good Looks Like
Item Net Sales Coverage near 100% is the goal. Reaching it matters more than costing every variant: variants with almost no sales don’t move your profit figures much.
Sort by Item Net Sales (the table starts that way) and work down the list. The Missing rows with the most Item Net Sales come first.
What to Do About It
- Find the Missing rows with the most Item Net Sales.
- In Shopify, open each product and set Cost per item on its variants.
- Wait for the next product update. Products from Shopify refresh every 8–12 hours on most subscriptions, as How Often Is My Data Updated explains.
- Open this report again. The rows you fixed show Costed, and Item Net Sales Coverage rises.
Costs apply to past periods as well, since reports use the cost set today.
Choose Export CSV to take the list into a spreadsheet, for whoever updates your costs. The file adds Product ID and Variant ID columns,.
Exporting needs the Export data permission. Schedule Export sends it on a schedule.
Where to Find It
- Unit Cost Coverage: open Reports and look under Profitability.
- P&L: shows how many line items have a cost, in the caption under COGS.
- Profit & Margin: shows Cost Coverage for each period.