How to Upload Your COGs in STK (Cost of Goods in Seller Tool Kit)

In order to truly understand your actual profits on Amazon, you need to ensure that you’re using Seller Tool Kit correctly. 

If you haven’t heard about STK before, I’d definitely advise you checking out my Seller Tool Kit Review. It’s a game changer.

Today, we are going to be showing you how to work out your Cost of Goods (COGs) and get these uploaded to STK with ease.

This will help you to see your true Return on Investment, instead of guessing or having a vague figure.

Ready to check out Seller Tool Kit?

Seller Tool Kit is a gamechanger, allowing you to truly understand your profits. It does even more than this, helping you to get refunds and reimbursements with ease. It’s a tool that you need for Long term Success.

What is Cost of Goods Sold or COGs?

CoGs Definition; Cost of Goods Sold

COGs is your cost of goods sheet which Seller Tool Kit uses to calculate your profitability. For those of you that have read my Amazon FBA Acronym post, you already know this!

It’s a downloadable sheet which you can use to provide the costs for every single item in your inventory.

It might sound a little strange at first, or even intimidating. Once you’ve seen how it works, you’ll understand it straight away.

If you aren’t using a Cost of Goods sheet, your profit figure is likely to be significantly different to what you expect it to be. I’d highly advise that you get yours sorted as soon as possible.

If you think of COGs as a Spreadsheet which contains all of your inventory, that will make the tutorial below much easier.

Let’s take a look below at how you can configure and upload this into SellerToolKit.

Downloading Your COGs on Seller Tool Kit

Before we can start to work on our Cost of Goods, we need to get this sheet downloaded to our computer.

To do this, you need to log in to Seller Tool Kit. After logging in, you’ll see your Dashboard. 

Along the menu on the left, you’ll need to click Reports.

It’s at this point I would like to point out that my above figures look a little low. This is true, I’m going to be away for 3 months in April so my sourcing efforts have slowed right down. I’m basically reducing myself to nil inventory and completing a rebuild on my return.

It should be fun and might make for another blog idea.

After you’ve pressed the reports button, you’ll see a large plus button (below). You need to click this.

After selecting this, a dropdown box will appear showing a number of reports that you can print off.

There are lots of useful reports that you can download, but we are only interested in the Cost of Goods.

There are two reports that you can download for your COGs, as seen below.

The two reports that we will be dealing with are: 

• Cost of Goods – Update List
• Cost of Goods – Full List. 

Let’s talk about the differences with the two reports.

Cost of Goods – Full List

It’s easier if I explain the Full List first. If it’s your first time playing around with your COGs, this is the one that you’ll want to download.

The reason for this, is that it will download every single ASIN that you have ever uploaded to your Amazon Seller account.

For your very first time, you’ll most likely have a good deal of ‘admin’ to do here. It won’t be very strenuous if you’ve already kept a spreadsheet of your item costs etc.

If you’re coming into this with over 500 ASINs, then you’ll have a few hours of work in all honesty. It’s definitely worth it though.

If you’ve got a larger database of inventory, the sheet will take a little longer to download. Once it’s completed, you’ll see a page just like below.

After you’ve downloaded this, you’ll need to locate the file. If you’re using chrome, this will be directly at the bottom of your screen. 

For Internet Explorer and Edge, you’ll have to click your downloads in the top right corner.

Opening Your COGs Sheet

Once you’ve located the file, you need to open it. However, don’t just click the TXT file, as this will open a strange sheet that looks a complete mess. Although it is a mess, it’s just because it’s formatted for Excel, not the Notepad.

I’ve attached this below, so you can tell what is the “wrong sheet” to open.

If you’ve opened the above file, you can go ahead and close this down.

Your next step is to open up Google Sheets, which is my preferred spreadsheet app. You can access this anywhere, from any PC, or mobile device etc.

• Your next step is to open up a new blank spreadsheet and Press File > Import.
• Navigate to the Upload tab and open your downloads folder, where you will find the Seller Tool Kit Cost of Goods file.
• Click on the COGs file and drag this into the Google Sheets uploads area. 

If you’ve done this successfully, you’ll see the below screen where the file is uploading. This will only take a few seconds, as Google Sheets is extremely fast.

After this has uploaded, it will ask you to confirm or configure the below settings.

As we have just opened up a new sheet, we can just simply replace the spreadsheet. The sheets are empty anyway, so it doesn’t really matter at this point. 

You don’t need to keep your cost of goods sheet once you’ve uploaded it to STK, so my preferred method is to just replace the spreadsheets anyway. This saves admin!

Your final step is to open the COG sheet 

How to Fill in the Cost of Goods Sheet for Seller Tool Kit

Now you’ve imported the data, it will have created a new spreadsheet with a few columns, just like ours below.

At first glance, this might look a little intimidating. You might be unsure of what you should be editing.

Let me settle those nerves by describing these columns, so you know exactly what you should be editing. The ones you should be editing are:

• Unit Cost – This is the cost per unit that you purchase. For example, if you purchase 10 units at £5 each, you need to enter the £5 as the unit cost. (Don’t enter the total order cost basically).
• Delivery Cost – You need to work out the Delivery Cost per unit. If you’ve paid £5 delivery for 10 units, that’s £0.50 you need to enter here.
• Prep Cost – These are the costs associated with preparing your goods for Amazon. I include the Polybag cost and the Amazon shipping fee per unit. I actually set this to £0.20 for smaller items, as I can fit lots of these into my boxes.

There’s also a few optional ones that you can add to help your record keeping, but personally I don’t do this. I like to keep the admin to a minimum, but putting the time in on these sheets can make things easier when it comes to Re-ordering items, or even finding invoices when it’s time for tax.

The Optional ones are:

• Supplier – You can enter the name of the supplier where you’ve purchased from
• Supplier Link – A URL to the website, for reference. 
• Order Number – This can help with accounting practices down the line.
• Lots of FBM Options – There are lots of columns for FBM, mainly related to shipping costs. 

Uploading the Cost of Goods to Seller Tool Kit

Using the options I have explained above, you can now make a start on your figures.

Once you have filled this in completely, it’s time to get these added into Seller Tool Kit. The next step is very important, as we need to export this in a specific format that STK can understand.

• Press File and select Download > Tab Separated Values. 

This will generate a TSV file, which is the same file that we advised you not to open up in Notepad earlier.

When this has downloaded, it’s time to head back to Seller Tool Kit.

Along the left of the screen, you’ll see a Cloud Icon, with the text Upload CoG. Select this.

This will show an empty area, asking you to drag and drop your Cost of Goods TSV file into the box.

After doing this, select the Upload Button and STK will get to work processing this. If you’ve filled in a lot of information, it might take a little longer.

As you can see below, I’ve got an item here that shows No CoG. Note, I took this picture beforehand, to show the difference.

Now I have waited for the CoG to process, this has updated the CoG figures. This will be vital for working out how much profit I have actually made.

In addition to this, this will ensure that your CoG inventory is exact to the penny. This will allow you to understand exactly how much inventory you have.

That’s It! You’ve successfully completed your CoG sheet. It wasn’t that hard, was it?

Running CoG Updates

As you continue scaling your Amazon FBA Business, you will inevitably find new products to sell on Amazon.

You won’t have these items listed in your CoG sheet, so you will need to run a periodic ‘CoG Update’ Report, which I mentioned a little earlier.

If you can schedule to do this once a month, or every 2 weeks, this will allow you to tackle it in smaller batches instead of spending hours updating a huge list.

Uploading into SellerToolKit works exactly the same, so I won’t bore you with that process.

Remember, if you don’t have a Seller Tool Kit account yet, but you want to support our blog, you can register here.

Remember as always, if there’s an aspect of Amazon FBA that you would like me to explain in depth, just drop a message in the comments!