The aim of Fetcher is to show you your profits as soon as possible after a sale so you always know how your business is trending. This can prove to be difficult as all the information about each sale is not made available to Fetcher until the sale has shipped. This is why we had to think outside of the box and created the Estimating Tool!
The Estimating Tool allows Fetcher to give you the most up to date and accurate picture of your profits before your items ship.
The Estimating Tool helps answer some of the top questions we get from customers every day such as "How does Fetcher show me revenue for Pending Units?" and "Why does my revenue look different than what I expected to see for the past few days?"
Since Fetcher needs to know the sales price and amount of the associated fees to be able to calculate your profit, the Estimating Tool uses your past sales history to 'estimate' these figures. Then, once the units ship, the actualized data is gathered from Amazon and your Fetcher account is updated replacing the estimates with the actualized values.
Let's take a closer look:
Pending units are units that have sold but have not yet shipped. You can see if you have any pending units for all items on the Dashboard by expanding the "Units Sold" section here:
This means the sales and order fees for the 71 units that have shipped are confirmed, while the sales and order fees for the 12 pending units are an estimate.
You can also take a look at the Sales Graph for a quick view and see that the sections made up of the Light Blue color are your pending sales:
You can also see this for a specific sku on the Product Breakdown page for a specific item here:
This means the sales and order fees for the 58 units of this item that have shipped are confirmed, while the sales and order fees for the 2 pending units for this item are an estimate.
Once the pending units ship, Fetcher will update these metrics to reflect the actual sales price and order fees associated with the sale.
Units will stay in pending status until they ship, but we typically see orders switch to shipped status with 2-3 days of the purchase. This can take a week or even longer if an order is being held up for any reason such as the availability of other items in the order or the shipping speed chosen by the customer.
How does the estimating tool work?
The Estimating Tool uses your recent sales history of the item to determine the estimated sales price and order fees. It is constantly updating its estimates for your items so that Fetcher is giving you the most accurate estimate of sales and fees possible.
If you are consistently selling an item at the same price day after day the estimate will be pretty close to the actual figures confirmed upon shipment.
Alternatively, if the item is fairly new or the sale price is often changing (coupons, split testing, sales & promotions, etc...) the Estimating Tool will have a harder time creating close estimates as it is using the most recent shipped sales data to generate the estimates.
Have you recently changed your sales price?
If you have recently changed your price for an item and have sold a few units, at first glance you may think Fetcher is not capturing the new sales price. Fetcher is, in fact, capturing the new sales price as we report the exact data for each order but you may not have had any (or very few) shipped units at the new price yet. As soon as those units ship and the sales totals are confirmed, you will be able to double check the calculation by dividing the total sales by the number of units sold.
As Fetcher aims to give you the most up to date and accurate picture of your business we didn't want to exclude pending units from view as they can make up a big chunk of your revenue on any given day.