Lesson 5 of 10
The bar
The business's required profit, decided once and applied to every product the same way, so "did it make money" stops being the question that matters.
Below are every one of Marleigh & Rowe’s 12 trading rows for the period, margins running from 33.8% to 57.6% — and not one of them is losing money.
That reads like the end of the story, and it is exactly where trusting Amazon’s own numbers stops being enough. “Did it make money?” is the wrong question, because rent, wages, software and the owner’s own hours never appear in an Amazon fee and never appear in a landed cost. A product can clear every cost Amazon knows about and still not be paying its share of a business that has costs Amazon has never heard of.
The bar
So the seller states a bar instead: the share of revenue this business has to keep, decided once, in the business’s own terms, and applied to every row exactly the same way. Compare a product against zero and almost anything clears — a business that only broke even would still be losing money once its real costs were counted. Compare it against the bar instead, and the question changes from “did this make money” to “did this make enough,” which is the only version of the question a business actually needs answered.
Marleigh & Rowe’s own bar covers software, storage kept outside FBA, part-time help, the owner’s own wage, and a return on the stock the Inventory page values.
Required, earned, and the gap
Measured against that bar, across 12 judged product rows, this account needed to keep $5,919.73 and it kept $11,531.39 — ahead by $5,611.66. Every row below carries its own share of that arithmetic, sorted from the thinnest margin to the widest.
Where the bar changes advertising
Break-even ACoS is the point a campaign stops making money — spend past it and every extra click costs more than the sale returns. Target ACoS is a stricter line: the point at which a campaign starts clearing this account’s own bar, rather than merely avoiding a loss. A campaign priced anywhere between those two figures is “profitable” on any report that stops at break-even, and is quietly eating the overhead the bar exists to cover.
What the app refuses to do
A row that cannot state a complete contribution — most often because its advertising spend cannot yet be attributed to it — gets no verdict here. Not a passing one and not a failing one. None were incomplete enough to drop this month — every trading row Marleigh & Rowe had appears in the table above. Every one of the 12 rows shown above could be measured against the bar; none was held back for a missing cost. A product whose advertising cannot be attributed is not “failing its target” — it is one nobody can judge yet, and saying otherwise is how a seller ends up killing a line that was fine.