The revenue number that hides an unprofitable product

A product can look healthy in your dashboard: 40 sales at £25 gives you £1,000 in revenue. Then the refunds arrive, Stripe takes its processing fee, three buyers need help accessing the files, and you spend an afternoon preparing the next batch. The sales number was real. It just was not the amount the product contributed to your business.

Start with contribution, not sales

Revenue answers one question: how much did customers pay? Contribution answers the more practical question: how much did this product leave available to pay you, cover business costs and fund the next piece of work?

Use a simple calculation for each product and review period: sales revenue minus refunds, payment fees, variable fulfilment costs and other direct costs equals contribution. If you sell a £30 template and refund one of ten sales, your revenue is £300, but the refunded £30 is no longer part of the contribution. Stripe's processing fee still applies to payments, so include the fee shown in your payment records rather than treating the whole selling price as yours.

The same logic works for a course, coaching package, membership or community. The costs change; the question does not. A digital download may have little cash cost but require customer support. A coaching call may have no postage or software fulfilment, but the delivery hour is part of the product.

List every cost that follows a sale

Make the list specific enough that you can check each item. Start with the payment fee, then add any cost that rises when the number of buyers rises. For a physical item, that might include packaging and postage. For a digital product, it might include a platform charge, a contractor's per-customer work or a licence that you buy for each participant.

Store.fan can reduce some operational friction when you sell from your own storefront. Sales money goes straight to your own Stripe account, and store.fan takes 0% of sales; Stripe's own processing fee still applies. You can use digital downloads for file delivery or hosted courses for course content, but fewer steps in delivery do not make support time disappear.

Put a value on your time

Time is easy to ignore because it does not always appear as a separate bank transaction. Add it anyway. Record the hours spent creating or updating the product, preparing fulfilment, replying to buyers, handling refunds and fixing access problems. Then divide contribution by those hours.

Suppose a £25 product sells 20 copies, with £50 of refunds and £20 of payment fees. If direct fulfilment costs £30, contribution before your time is £400: £500 minus £50, £20 and £30. If the product took 16 hours to make and support during that period, it produced £25 per hour before your wider business costs.

That is not a universal hourly rate or a command to abandon the product. It is a comparison tool. If another offer produces £300 from six hours, the second offer may deserve more attention even though its revenue is lower. You can also separate one-off creation time from ongoing monthly work, because a product that takes 20 hours to build may become efficient if it continues selling without equivalent effort.

Compare products on the same basis

1. 1Choose a review period, such as one month or one launch cycle.
2. 2Record the price, number of sales, refunds and payment fees for each product.
3. 3Add direct cash costs and the hours spent creating, delivering and supporting it.
4. 4Calculate contribution before time, then contribution per hour.
5. 5Write down what changed: price, traffic source, discount, launch format, support request or fulfilment method.
6. 6Choose one action for the next period: keep, improve, raise the price, reduce the work or stop selling.

Keep the comparison fair. Do not compare a mature evergreen product's monthly support time with the full creation time of a brand-new course unless you are deliberately comparing the investment. You may want two views: current contribution per hour for running the business, and lifetime contribution per total hours for deciding whether the original effort paid back.

Use the result to change the offer

A weak contribution result does not always mean the product needs more promotion. First identify the mechanism. Frequent access questions may point to unclear instructions or a better delivery system. Refunds may show that the sales page promises a different outcome from the product. High support time may mean the offer needs a narrower buyer, a setup guide or a group format.

Discounts need their own calculation. A lower price can increase contribution if it leads to enough additional sales without adding matching support work. For example, two sales at £40 create £80 before costs; three sales at £25 create £75 before costs. The second result has more buyers but less revenue, before you have counted the extra delivery and support.

You can also test packaging rather than simply cutting the price. A download might have a self-serve version and a higher-priced version with a coaching call. Store.fan supports several formats, including coaching calls, and its Pro plan adds tools such as discount codes, email marketing and creator-run affiliate programmes. Each option should be judged by the contribution it creates and the time it consumes.

Build a small review habit

You do not need a complicated finance system. Keep one row per product with sales, refunds, fees, direct costs, hours and contribution. Review it at a regular interval. A storefront such as store.fan can give you one place for checkout and delivery, while the analytics feature can help you inspect the selling activity you need for the review. Your own notes still matter for time and support, because those are not fully captured by sales data.

If you sell from store.fan, its iOS app can send instant sale alerts, which is useful for noticing when an offer starts moving. Do not confuse an alert with a conclusion. Wait until the review period ends, subtract what left the business, and ask what the product required from you.