Ask ten shop owners what profit they make on an item and most will say something like "I add 20%". Ask what share of their sales is profit and they'll say 20% again. Those two can't both be true, and the gap between them is real money.
Two numbers that sound alike
Say an item costs you ₦1,000 and you sell it for ₦1,250. Your profit is ₦250.
Markup compares that profit with what you paid. ₦250 ÷ ₦1,000 = 25%.
Margin compares it with what the customer paid. ₦250 ÷ ₦1,250 = 20%.
Same item, same ₦250. Markup is always the bigger number, because it is measured against the smaller amount.
| Markup on cost | Margin on selling price |
|---|---|
| 10% | 9.1% |
| 20% | 16.7% |
| 25% | 20% |
| 33.3% | 25% |
| 50% | 33.3% |
| 100% | 50% |
Why it matters: your rent, salaries and fuel are paid out of sales. If those costs eat 18% of everything you sell, and you "add 20%" to your goods, your margin is 16.7%. You are losing money on every sale while believing you make 20%.
Start from what the item really cost you
The supplier's price is not your cost. Your cost is what you had spent by the time the item was sitting on your shelf.
Here is an example with made-up figures. You buy a carton of 12 bottles of body lotion for ₦30,000. Transport from the market is ₦1,200 and the loader takes ₦300. The carton has cost you ₦31,500, so each bottle is ₦31,500 ÷ 12 = ₦2,625.
That's the landed cost. If one bottle in every carton usually arrives leaking, divide by 11 and the cost is ₦2,864. Price from the number of bottles you can actually sell.
From cost to price
Decide the margin you need, then use this:
Selling price = cost ÷ (1 − margin)
For a 20% margin on the lotion: ₦2,625 ÷ 0.80 = ₦3,281. Round up to ₦3,300.
Check it. Profit is ₦3,300 − ₦2,625 = ₦675, and ₦675 ÷ ₦3,300 is 20.5%. Good.
Now see what happens if you "add 20%" instead: ₦2,625 × 1.20 = ₦3,150. Profit is ₦525, and the margin is 16.7%. The difference is ₦150 a bottle. On 40 bottles a week, that's ₦6,000 a week, or about ₦312,000 over a year, from one product.
What margin do you need?
Enough to cover the costs of running the shop, with something left for you.
Add up a normal month's running costs: rent (the yearly figure divided by 12), salaries, fuel and electricity, data and airtime, transport that isn't tied to a particular purchase, levies, and losses from damage and expiry. Divide by a normal month's sales. If the costs are ₦270,000 and sales are ₦1,800,000, that's 15%.
In that shop, a product with a 15% margin earns the owner nothing. Everything above 15% is what you actually keep.
You won't use one margin for everything
Some goods have prices the whole street knows: a sachet of water, a loaf of bread, a recharge card, a popular brand of noodles. You can't price those much above the shop next door, so they'll carry thin margins. Their job is to bring people in.
The margin comes from goods where the customer doesn't have a fixed price in mind: cosmetics, accessories, gift items, anything unusual. A shop's pricing skill is mostly knowing which is which.
What matters is the blend. Work out your margin across the whole month, not item by item, and compare it with the running-cost figure above.
When your supplier's price goes up
Reprice the stock already on your shelf, not only the new delivery. The money from selling today's bottle has to buy tomorrow's, at tomorrow's price. A shop that sells old stock at the old price finds it can afford fewer cartons each time it restocks, even though sales looked healthy.
Keep the landed cost on each item's page in your stock record book, and update it with every delivery. Then repricing takes minutes, and your daily sales book will show whether the new price is holding.