How do I track my real profit per Whatnot show?

The number on screen at the end of a show is what buyers agreed to pay for the items. Between that and your bank account sit the marketplace's fees on every order, postage on anything you shipped at your own cost, giveaways, refunds that arrive days later, and whatever you spent to promote the show. A show can look like your best night and keep less than a quiet one.

The Whatnot fee calculator shows the fee arithmetic for a single sale. A whole show is a few hundred of those plus everything a formula cannot know, so the reliable source is the receipt on each order.

• Gross sales. The item subtotal of every order from that show.
• Fees. What was actually deducted on each order, split into commission, payment processing and shipping, as the receipt states it.
• Shipping you paid. Labels that came out of your side, including giveaways.
• Refunds and cancellations. Booked against the show that produced them, not the week they settled.
• Promotion spend. Anything you paid to put the show in front of people.
• Cost of the items. What you paid for the stock that sold.

The first five come from the marketplace. Only the last one comes from you, and it is the one a spreadsheet built from payout reports never has unless you put it there.

LiveStreamPro's P&L page is built from the orders and receipts captured from your Whatnot account. It reports:

• orders, gross sales, fees and net for each show, in a table you can sort by any of them
• fees split into commission, payment processing, shipping and other, read from each receipt rather than estimated from a rate
• what you paid for shipping labels, alongside how many shipments carried a label cost
• the effect of refunds, your tips, your payouts, and your promotion spend where Whatnot's ledger records it
• a trend by day, week or month over the last 7, 30 or 90 days, this year, or all time

Where a figure was never captured, the page says so instead of showing a zero. Promotion spend that was never captured is shown as unknown, not as nothing spent.

LiveStreamPro's P&L does not know what you paid for your inventory, so it reports net after fees per show and does not claim a profit margin. To get from net to profit, subtract your cost of goods for the items that sold in that show.

For a single item you can do that in the fee calculator: enter what the item cost you and it adds profit, margin and the break-even sale price to the fee breakdown. For the fee rules themselves, see Whatnot seller fees explained.