How to Price Products Profitably: A Notion Pricing Calculator
Work out a selling price that actually makes money, then track stock and profit beside it. A Notion pricing calculator and inventory tracker for small sellers.
Most small product businesses price by looking at what competitors charge and shaving a bit off. It's an understandable instinct and it's how sellers end up busy, sold out, and somehow no better off at the end of the year. Pricing from cost upward, rather than from the market downward, is the fix.
MarginMate is a Notion price calculator and inventory tracker built for exactly that: work out what a product genuinely costs you, decide the margin you need, and see what you should be charging.
The costs sellers forget
Ask someone what a product costs them and they'll usually name the materials. The materials are rarely more than half the real number. Everything below is a genuine per-unit cost, and leaving any of them out is how a healthy-looking margin turns into a break-even year.
- Materials and components, including the offcuts and waste you don't sell.
- Packaging, which is easy to underestimate when you buy it in bulk once a year.
- Shipping to the customer, and the share of returns you actually eat.
- Marketplace and payment fees, typically a meaningful slice of the sale price.
- Your own labour, at a rate you'd accept from someone else doing the work.
Margin versus markup, the mistake that costs money
These get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. A 50% markup on a $10 cost gives a $15 price, which is a 33% margin. If you needed a 50% margin, the price is $20. Sellers who confuse the two consistently underprice, and the gap compounds across every unit they ever sell.
Markup is measured against your cost. Margin is measured against your price. Only one of them pays your bills.
Why the inventory tracker sits in the same template
Price and stock are the same conversation. A product with a good margin that's always out of stock earns nothing. A product with a thin margin that ties up cash in a slow-moving pile of inventory is worse than not selling it. Seeing units on hand next to margin per unit is what makes the decision to discontinue something obvious rather than agonising.
Using the worksheet
- Enter one product with every real cost, including your time. Be uncomfortable about it.
- Set the margin you need, not the one you hope for.
- Compare the calculated price to what you charge today. This is usually the moment of truth.
- Repeat for your top five sellers, which is where most of the money is decided.
- Log stock levels so slow movers stop hiding behind your bestsellers.
What to do if the number is uncomfortable
If the honest price is well above what you charge, you have three real options: raise the price, cut the cost, or stop selling that product. Selling it at a loss because customers like it is a hobby, and that's fine as long as you're choosing it deliberately rather than discovering it in December.
Pair it with the free Business Finance dashboard to see whether the improved margins are actually showing up in your monthly profit. Get MarginMate and start with your best-selling product.