Consumer Products
If you sell physical units, margin is made or lost after the sale. Model buyer cohorts, repeat purchase, and a channel margin waterfall across D2C, marketplace, and wholesale, on landed cost rather than list price.
Units, price, landed COGS
The problem
The number that kills consumer products brands is the gap between the price on the website and what actually reaches the bank. Marketplace commission, payment fees, discounting, returns, shipping, and the landed cost of the goods themselves all sit between the two. A model built on list price times units will show a healthy margin on a product that loses money on every marketplace order.
What a SaaS template gets wrong
A subscription template has nowhere to put landed cost, no concept of an order, and no way to represent the same product earning three different margins depending on which channel it sold through. Forcing a physical product into it produces a gross margin that is simply invented.
The drivers
How YourCFO models it
Buyers are acquired as cohorts and follow a repeat purchase curve, so a returning customer is worth what they actually reorder rather than being counted once and forgotten.
D2C, marketplace, and wholesale are modeled separately. Commission, fees, discounts, and fulfillment come off before margin, so the same unit can carry a different contribution in each channel, which is what really happens.
Cost of sales is built on landed COGS rather than ex-factory price, so freight and duty land in the model instead of being discovered at year end.
Cash collected is tracked apart from accrual revenue, which matters when marketplace and wholesale pay on very different terms from your D2C checkout.
you push a channel mix shift toward marketplace
top-line units rise, but commission and fees take a bigger cut, so contribution margin moves in the opposite direction to revenue and the model shows you by how much.
The numbers that matter
What is actually left per unit after fees, discounts, and fulfillment in each channel.
The real delivered cost of the goods, including freight and duty.
How often a buyer comes back and what they spend, which together decide what a customer is worth.
When money actually arrives, given how differently each channel settles.
The chart of accounts seeds product revenue by channel, landed cost of goods, inventory, and fulfillment and platform fees as their own lines, so the margin waterfall exists in the books and not only in the forecast.
Common questions
Other models
Order book, capacity, yield
Demand you cannot produce is not revenue. Model an order book against real production capacity from machines, shifts, and yield, with output clamped to whichever is lower and unit cost moving with utilization.
Cohorts, ARPU, retention
Consumer subscriptions do not churn at a flat rate. Model acquisition cohorts against a retention curve, with revenue as active users times ARPU, so month one drop-off and the long tail are both visible.
Contracts, ACV, churn
Model B2B revenue the way it actually behaves: per-customer contracts, ACV, churn, and expansion, driven by a sales-led and marketing-led funnel rather than a growth percentage.
Set up the model that matches your business, then watch what your next decision does to the bottom line.