Amazon Vendor Economics · Glossary

Shipped COGS

Updated October 25, 2026

Shipped COGS (shipped cost of goods sold) is Amazon's cost for the units it shipped to customers: the purchase-order cost price Amazon paid the first-party (1P) vendor. Put plainly, it is the cost Amazon paid you for the units it shipped. It is the cost line in Net PPM (Net Pure Product Margin), Amazon's product-level margin metric, where it pairs with Shipped Revenue, Amazon's retail revenue from units actually shipped to customers. This is the 1P vendor term, not the cost of goods a third-party (3P) seller tracks for its own inventory.

The cost is Amazon's, not the vendor's. For a 1P vendor, Amazon's cost of goods is the vendor's revenue: in the vendor's own gross-to-net model, units received by Amazon times the cost price on the purchase order. The two sides also count on different bases. Shipped COGS counts units shipped out to customers, while co-op (the allowances a vendor funds under its agreement with Amazon), damage and freight allowances accrue against net receipts, the units received into Amazon's warehouses.

Where does shipped COGS show up for a 1P vendor?

In Amazon's margin formula, and in the baseline for next year's terms.

1. In Net PPM. The formula reads Net PPM = Shipped Revenue - Shipped COGS + Contra-COGS - Sales Discounts, and Amazon's own vendor analytics schema states the same formula, divided by shipped revenue, writing the cost term as "Shipped CCOGS". Contra-COGS is the vendor-funded money Amazon books against its cost of goods. Net PPM, and so the shipped COGS inside it, sits under Reports, then Retail Analytics, in Vendor Central, and in Amazon's vendor analytics data through its API (application programming interface).
2. In annual planning. Vendor and Amazon use last year's shipped COGS and net receipts as the baseline for growth targets and rebate thresholds.
3. In billing checks. A freight allowance charged on the wrong base, net receipts versus shipped COGS, is a known billing error to check for.

The same item-level margin math sits behind CRaP (Can't Realize a Profit), Amazon's label for an item it cannot resell profitably. Before you start contra-COGS and co-op recovery, check which base the freight allowance was charged on.