Creating your first pricing formula

Formula pricing sets your prices from cost and a target profit — one rule, applied to thousands of products, with a full preview before anything changes. This guide builds your first D2C net-profit formula, with real-world examples.

Before you start

Formula pricing reads the Cost per item field on each product. If a product has no cost, BulkOps.ai skips it (and tells you), so nothing is ever mis-priced.

• Add costs in Shopify admin → Products → [product] → Cost per item, or bulk-import them from a CSV.
• Formula pricing is available on the Starter plan and above.

Markup vs. margin — the 30-second version

The most common pricing mistake is confusing markup with margin:

• Markup is added on top of cost. A 50% markup on a $20 cost is $30 — only a 33% margin.
• Margin is the share of the selling price you keep. To actually hold 50% margin on a $20 cost, you sell at $40.

BulkOps.ai supports both, so you price by whichever you actually mean.

Step 1 — Open Formula Pricing

In BulkOps.ai, go to Pricing → Formula Pricing and click New Formula.

Step 2 — Name it

Give the formula a descriptive name like “55% net-profit target”. The name shows up in your campaign history and version log.

Step 3 — Write the expression

Type your pricing expression. The cost variable maps to Shopify’s cost per item (lowercase only):

Goal	Expression
2.5× markup	cost * 2.5
40% gross margin	cost / (1 - 0.40)
Full cost-stack, 55% net (incl. $4 ship & fees)	(cost + 4) / (1 - 0.55)
Tiered by cost band	cost < 20 ? cost * 3 : cost * 2.2

Step 4 — Rounding (optional)

• Charm pricing — round to the nearest $X.99 (e.g. $42.13 → $41.99)
• Round up to the nearest $1 (e.g. $42.13 → $43.00)
• No rounding — exact calculated values

Step 5 — Filter products

Choose which products the formula applies to — by collection, product type, vendor, tag, or price range.

Step 6 — Preview

Click Preview. BulkOps.ai calculates the new price for every filtered product and shows an old → new comparison. A snapshot is captured first, so the whole run is reversible.

Step 7 — Apply or schedule

• Apply now — updates prices immediately.
• Schedule — set a start time (and an optional end time to auto-revert). Perfect for a weekend sale that snaps back on Monday.

Troubleshooting

“Cost missing for X products.” Those products have no cost per item. BulkOps.ai skips them rather than mis-pricing — add costs in Shopify and re-run.

Formula returns 0. Check the variable is cost (lowercase). Cost and COST aren’t recognized.

Prices look too low. You probably used a markup where you meant a margin — see the section above.